. 



NVI TAT IONS 

)f )URLOKB 





Class H. V 1 ? 3 3 

Book ,1 5 3^ 

Copyright^? 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



"The Christian's Day." 
A Book of Meditations for the 

Daily Life of a Christian. 
257 PP-> i2mo. cloth, gilt . . . 
Popular edition, paper cover . 
Second Thousand. 

" Meditations on the Creed." 
512 pp., i2mo. cloth, gilt . . . 
Second Thousand. 

" The Self-Revelation of Our 

Lord." 

Meditations on the self-revealing 

titles applied by our Lord to 

Himself. 

334 PP-> i2mo. cloth, gilt . . . 

"Holiness, A Note of the 
Church." 
i2mo., 166 pp., cloth .... 
Out of Print. 



$1.50 
.50 



2.00 



1.50 



1. 00 



"The Office and Work of the 
Holy Spirit." 

i2mo 1.50 

Out of Print. 



THE INVITATIONS OF 
OUR LORD 

NOTES OF MEDITATIONS 



BY 

THE REV. J. G. H. BARRY, D.D. 



NEW YORK 
EDWIN S. GORHAM, PUBLISHER 

11 WEST 45th STREET 
1918 



■$\l 



1S& 



Copyright 

by 

Edwin S. Gorham 

1918 



JAN 24 I9J9 



•CUE I 2215 



^ 



TO 
THE FORTY WHO CARE 



PREFACE 

These Outlines of Meditations are published 
in response to what seems a real demand for such 
books. I am asked from time to time to recom- 
mend books of outlines, and have found that the 
number of such books prepared for the use of 
the laity is very limited. I hope therefore that 
I am offering a book that will be useful, and in 
offering it I have no ambition beyond that, it 
is prepared on the basis of notes that have been 
tested in parish and retreat work and have been 
found not unacceptable. I have aimed at some- 
thing between a fully worked out meditation and 
a bald outline, because that seems to me to be 
what many want. I have worked out the pre- 
ludes fully for no other reason than that I found 
it interesting to do. I have prefixed at my pub- 
lisher's request a paper on the method of medi- 
tation. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

I Introduction: How to Make a 

Meditation 

II The Invitation to Discipleship 

III The Invitation to Repentance 

IV The Invitation to Preparation 
V The Invitation to Experience 

VI The Invitation to Discipline . 

VII The Invitation to Rest . 

VIII The Invitation to Faith . 

IX The Invitation to Deliverance 

X The Invitation Refused . . . 

XI The Invitation to Forgiveness 

XII The Invitation to Self-Knowl 

edge 

XIII The Call of Urgency . 

XIV The Invitation to Communion 
XV The Invitation to Children . 

XVI The Invitation to the Thirsty 

XVII The Invitation to Knowledge 

XVIII The Invitation of the Fellow 

Workers 

XIX The Welcome 

XX Our Invitation to Jesus ... 



PAGE 

i 
23 
37 
5i 
65 
79 

93 
107 

121 

135 
149 

162 

175 
190 
205 
219 
234 

250 
265 
280 



HOW TO MAKE A MEDITATION 

CROGRESS in the spiritual life, like prog- 
ress in anything else, requires effort. It 
requires the systematic and persistent use of 
means appropriate to the end we are seeking. 
Indeed the spiritual life is an art, in the success- 
ful prosecution of which we require careful train- 
ing to perceive the values that it is worth while 
to seek, and to master the instruments by which 
those values may be acquired. From time to 
time, we hear of spiritual geniuses to whom the 
acquisition of holiness seems to cost little in the 
way of effort; but to most of us, I fancy, spir- 
itual genius still remains a matter of taking pains. 
We may be glad that this is so, for anyone can 
take pains. 

When once we become serious in the matter 
of spiritual advancement, and begin to ask what 
helps are available to aid us in the making of 
spiritual conquests, we are, among the first aids 
to spiritual discipline, pointed to the practice of 



2 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

meditation. A friend tells me that he has found 
meditation most helpful, and perhaps sends me 
a book that has been useful to him. Or reading 
some book on the spiritual life we come upon 
the commendation of meditation as one of the 
advanced forms of prayer, and are led to seek 
further light upon this practice. We take up the 
practice and after a little feel that it is not help- 
ing us, and we lay it aside. Our disappointment 
is in proportion to the hope with which we began. 
I am writing these words with a purpose of help- 
ing some to begin the practice of meditation in- 
telligently, so that they may avoid failure ; and of 
inducing others, who think that they have demon- 
strated the uselessness of the practice for them- 
selves, whatever may be the case with others, to 
try again in a way that, by avoiding previous 
errors, may perchance lead them to great spiritual 
profit and joy. 

Perhaps the most complete characterization of 
the Christian life would be to describe it as a life 
of prayer. Whatever else may or may not be 
present, a prayer experience is certainly indis- 
pensable. But prayer means a great many things. 
A child has a prayer experience which begins with 
the recitations of certain simple forms taught it 
by its mother. These are not in any full sense, 
understood at the outset, and yet I think that 



HOW TO MAKE A MEDITATION 3 

there is expressed through them a sense of de- 
pendence and of appeal to one outside us who 
loves and cares. It is astonishing to find how 
many there are who never get beyond this infant 
experience, and whose prayer life never develops 
to any felt need that cannot be satisfied by this 
simple recitation of elementary forms. In many 
cases, indeed, the same forms which are learned 
in childhood are preserved unaltered through life 
— the spiritual experience, as far as one sees, 
never gets beyond the stage of recognition of de- 
pendence and petition for providential care. In 
the case of others the prayers are changed, but 
the prayers themselves remain at the stage of 
petition. In fact it is not unusual to hear sur- 
prise expressed at the suggestion that there are 
degrees of prayer, and that petition is the lowest 
degree. 

That, of course, is the fact. I do not mean 
by that, that all degrees of prayer are successive, 
and that we pass from one to another, leaving 
one behind as we enter the other, but that the 
prayer life so expands as to contain greater di- 
versity of content as we press on spiritually. 
We never pass beyond the need of petition to ex- 
press certain relations to our Father in heaven, 
but we do establish other relations than those 
that are satisfied by petition. It is quite analo- 



4 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

gous to what takes place in human relation. The 
relation of a child to its parents undergoes great 
expansion and diversification as it grows in age 
and understanding of life. Relation to a person 
implies the exercise of all that is contained in 
our own personality, but the elements of a com- 
plex personality unfold slowly, and in the un- 
folding seek satisfaction in communion with 
other persons. Our parents are the first to call 
us into the conscious exercise of all our personal 
powers ; but those powers do not find their highest 
and most significant exercises until we have 
learned how they may be exercised in relation to 
God. 

One of the powers that earliest demands exer- 
cise is the intelligence, the power of thought. It 
seems to me one of the great disasters of our 
education, or our lack of it, is that the young are 
so rarely taught to think connectedly about God, 
and the things of God. When the time comes, 
as it is pretty sure to come, when young men 
and women have to face the fact of the existence 
of a systematic body of negation of all Christian 
truth, they are quite liable to meet it unprepared 
— in the possession, it is true, of certain dog- 
matic statements about religion, but with no real 
comprehension of their meaning or of the grounds 
of their justification. The young for the most 



HOW TO MAKE A MEDITATION 5 

part, encounter religious negation, of which the 
modern world is full, without preparation and 
without means of defense. 

One of the best means of defense is the habit 
of mental prayer — of meditation, as it is com- 
monly called. But, of course, its primary use is 
not one of defense. It is a form of prayer suited 
for the exercise of one's intellectual nature and 
for the putting it into realized and conscious re- 
lation with God. In other words we start from 
the conviction that all the elements of our com- 
plex personality have necessary relations to God, 
which we must make active if our spiritual devel- 
opment is to be normal ; that we can neither love 
God nor obey Him in a way fully to satisfy us 
unless we love Him and obey Him intelligently. 
Mental prayer is an effort to know the truth that 
the truth may make us free. 

In meditation then, one's primary effort is to 
know, to understand. At the same time we must 
carefully guard this statement. What one is at- 
tempting is not a course of study, a philosophical 
or theological discipline, but an exercise of the 
mental faculties under rigorous spiritual direc- 
tion. Indeed whatever study is necessary to the 
intellectual apprehension of the truth, which we 
are to meditate upon, should take place before 
the meditation begins. In order to profit spir- 



6 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

itually we need to be free from the mechanical 
labor of acquiring the meaning of the terms we 
are to use. If one were intending to spend a 
half hour in meditation on a passage from one 
of St. Paul's epistles, one would need to make 
sure that one understood the grammatical mean- 
ing of the passage and its relation to the context 
before one began one's meditation, otherwise the 
half hour might pass before one were ready to 
meditate at all. It cannot be too much empha- 
sized that meditation is not just study under spe- 
cial conditions. 

It is indeed an effort to know; to know God 
and our relations to Him. In meditation we take 
a spiritual truth which is, it may be, quite familiar 
as a statement of fact, then try to think our way 
into it, as a fact with bearing on our own lives. 
The Incarnation, for example, is a fact The na- 
ture of this fact we have learned in the course 
of our religious education, or failing that we now 
study it in the theological outline which every 
Christian ought to have as handy as his Bible or 
Prayer-book. But meditation on the Incarnation 
means taking that fact or some phase of it, and 
thinking out its relations to my own life and 
action. There are endless ways in which so large 
a fact can be brought into relation with life. Or 
take a fact more easily handled, the fact of venial 



HOW TO MAKE A MEDITATION 7 

sin. Again one's education brings out the mean- 
ing of the fact, — what meditation should do is 
to realize the fact as a fact of my experience, and 
to consider the details of that experience in past 
and present, and to plan and resolve for the future. 

Any religious truth whatever must have rela- 
tion to my life, and personal religion is the find- 
ing of that relation and making it active. The 
sphere, therefore, of meditation is practically 
limitless ; it covers all the truths of religion. But 
to get into a fruitful relation with any truth 
through the understanding of it, and the working 
out of its relation to our own lives, necessarily 
means not simply an intellectual exercise, but the 
exercise of all the powers of one's personality — 
a spiritual effort, that is, which cannot but be 
conducive to spiritual growth. Meditation, there- 
fore, is this effort of the whole personality. It 
is a very efficacious instrument in our spiritual 
development. 

Indeed, I would go as far as to say that I do 
not believe that there is any means of spiritual 
advancement, outside the Sacraments, so uni- 
formly effective as the daily meditation. It 
means the steady exertion of spiritual energy, 
which must result in growth. Day by day we 
are spending a certain number of minutes in 
thinking out some truth, after having expressly 



8 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

asked the aid of God the Holy Ghost, and in 
bringing the meaning of that truth home to our 
lives — bringing all our powers to bear on the 
problem : " what is that truth to me, what is God 
trying to say to me through it?" Is it neces- 
sary to make a meditation every day? one is asked. 
And the answer, — Yes, yes ; that is, under the 
rubric of common sense. It is obvious that ir- 
regular and widely spaced meditations cannot 
exert the spiritual pressure on life which the 
daily meditation does. Regularity and fre- 
quency are essential to keeping one in an ex- 
pectant and receptive attitude. One meditation 
a week, say, while it may have certain limited use, 
cannot be expected to accomplish the spiritual re- 
sult of the daily meditation. 

We shall catch the point of this if we remind 
ourselves that meditation is not study but prayer. 
It is the offering of our intellectual powers to 
God as a means through which He may make 
Himself known to us. While I am using all my 
power to think into a truth, I am really offering 
that power as a channel by means of which God 
may show me the truth. I am asking, not merely 
understanding, but enlightenment. So my intel- 
lectual act is an aspiration, an act of worship, an 
oblation of myself to the Holy Spirit. I am sure 
that to the intellect so consecrated, God will re- 



HOW TO MAKE A MEDITATION 9 

veal Himself, and that I shall go from my medi- 
tation with further knowledge of God and of my- 
self, and therefore better fitted to meet whatever 
the day shall bring. I have assimilated some por- 
tion of truth that is my growth thereby. 

I think the general experience is that a medi- 
tation should be made in the morning. One's 
mind is then fresh and the affairs of the day have 
not begun to intrude themselves and make con- 
centration difficult. It is an additional advantage 
(not an objection as seems commonly thought), 
that the process of securing the first minutes of 
the morning means a sacrifice ■ — usually the sac- 
rifice involved in rising half an hour or twenty 
minutes sooner than we are accustomed to. Or 
it might mean the adjustment of other duties to 
a changed schedule. In any case the securing of 
the early morning for the meditation is worth the 
sacrifice and we ought not to decide that such 
time cannot be given until a very serious effort 
has been made. 

However if it is actually impossible to secure 
time for meditation in the morning, the medita- 
tion can be made at another time. The morning 
hour is selected because experience shows that 
that is the best time, not that there is anything 
so sacred about it that if one cannot meditate 
then there is no use attempting the meditation at 



IO THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

any other time. One can easily imagine circum- 
stances in which other hours, as the late evening 
hours, are the only ones available. If quiet can 
then be secured and the world shut out, the medi- 
tation can be profitably made. 

Whatever the time, the meditation will be es- 
sentially the same. I say essentially because there 
must be a certain freedom in detail, or we are 
likely to become the slaves of method; or finding 
a given method unworkable, conclude that we 
are unable to make a meditation. The latter is a 
very real danger because we usually begin the 
practice of meditating by attempting to follow the 
method of someone else. We may, it is true, 
prove docile to the method, and then all is well; 
but we may equally well prove recalcitrant to it, 
and then all is not well at all. In most cases we 
shall find that we have to adjust the details of 
method to our own peculiarities, and end in mak- 
ing a method which fits us and in which we can 
move easily. We shall not hesitate to do this, 
the essentials of meditation being preserved. 

What is most essential is that we should learn 
to meditate and not learn to do something else 
which is a substitute for meditation, and think it 
the same thing, or just as good. Again, remem- 
ber that meditation is not just intellectual exer- 
cise, and the same as a study period. We may 



HOW TO MAKE A MEDITATION II 

not for instance, spend several hours with a Bible 
dictionary and a commentary working out the 
meaning of a passage of scripture, and then close 
our books with a feeling that we have been medi- 
tating. The half hour's study might admirably 
prepare us for meditation — get ready for us an 
outline that we can use — but in itself it is not 
mental prayer. 

Nor can we do a half hour's reading in the 
Bible or some devotional book, and feel that it is 
the equivalent of meditation. It is an excellent 
thing to do and therefore often presents itself as 
a temptation. But the very fact that we feel it 
easier and a relaxation from our rule, reveals 
its nature as a substitute for the harder thing we 
are attempting. Again, devotional reading, like 
the study of Holy Scripture, is admirable as a 
basis for meditation — it suggests subjects and 
furnishes outlines but it must not be treated as 
the thing itself. 

There is another temptation to the misuse of 
meditation which crops up in some cases, and that 
is to make the meditation a means to a further 
end. A priest is tempted to turn a meditation 
into a sermon outline and feels that while he is 
helping his own spiritual life he is also accumu- 
lating material for helping others. The defect 
of such meditation is obvious; it is made with a 



12 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

divided attention. The mind is rather more than 
half on the availability of thought for the sermon, 
and thoughts which are not so available, no mat- 
ter how personally valuable, are apt to get scant 
attention and small development. The same 
thing is true of the Sunday-school or guild teacher 
— the temptation to make prayer a utilitarian oc- 
cupation. 

But these rocks being successfully avoided, 
and the right conception of meditation being at- 
tained, the further question arises, what are we 
to meditate upon? I am assuming the case of 
one quite new to the practice, who faces the fact 
that he is to begin the use of intellectual prayer, 
and then finds the pressing question, " what am 
I to pray about, on what am I to meditate ? " 
The field of possible choice is very wide, and 
what is wise for one to undertake is not wise for 
another, and what is wise at one stage of spiritual 
experience is not wise for another. 

I would class the available material on which 
to meditate as follows: I. Devotional Books. 
2. Prepared outlines. 3. Theological treatises. 
4. Holy Scriptures. 

1. I would class devotional books as the least 
helpful material on which to base one's medita- 
tion. For one thing the attempt to keep medi- 
tation and devotional reading separate is rather 



HOW TO MAKE A MEDITATION 1 3 

difficult. One starts to read a paragraph, and 
then to meditate upon it, but easily reads on, 
either because the attention is caught and carried 
away, so that we forget that we are engaged in 
mental prayer; or because the attention is not 
caught, and we read on in hopes of falling in 
with a thought that is suggestive on which to base 
our meditation. Either way the time passes and 
no meditation has been made. There is another 
objection to the attempt to use such books as the 
basis of meditation, and that is that the thought 
is already pretty fully worked out so that there is 
little of that suggestiveness which is so essential 
to the material used as the basis of meditation. 
There are people who find the printed book help- 
ful in meditation, but I do not believe they are 
numerous. There is one way in which a devo- 
tional book can be profitably used, and that is to 
make an analysis of a given page and then base 
the meditation on the outline so obtained. 

2. The prepared outline avoids the dangers of 
the devotional book. It does not tempt to read- 
ing and, theoretically, it achieves suggestiveness. 
It is true, I suppose, that there are not many peo- 
ple who find it easy or, indeed, practical, to de- 
velop the meaning of a subject given for medi- 
tation without help until practice has brought 
them facility. The outline, therefore, is the al- 



14 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

most inevitable method for the beginner. The 
outline gives the thought, and one turns that over 
and over in one's mind and appreciates it from 
several points of view, and applies it to one's own 
case, holding on to it as long as the process is 
fruitful. One of the temptations to be avoided 
in this matter is the feeling that we must get on, 
must finish this meditation in the half hour, and 
so hurry from points before we have exhausted 
them. This we should never do, there is never 
any obligation to get on. 

Here we must note that not all outlines are 
suitable for all people. We can only tell by ex- 
perimenting what books of outlines will be use- 
ful to us. We need to find a mind of a quality 
somewhat like our own before the thoughts of 
another will set our mind working. The thought- 
suggestions of a mystic are not likely to stimu- 
late the so-called practical mind. On the other 
hand, after one's experience is sufficiently devel- 
oped, it might not be a bad thing, for one type 
of mind to occupy its thoughts, at times, with the 
suggestions of the other type. It may be pointed 
out here that not all that you find under the head 
of outlines of meditation are really such. There 
are books which sell as outlines of meditation, 
which are really sermon outlines. There are 
others which are outlines o*f meditations, but 



HOW TO MAKE A MEDITATION 1 5 

which lack the prime quality of suggestiveness. 
One fears that the author never meditated 
through them himself. The rule here is: experi- 
ment until you find out what you want. 

3. I speak of theological treatises as a separate 
class of meditation material, because they afford 
the matter on which a good deal of our medi- 
tating ought to be based. Our temptation is to 
take material which can be rather easily handled ; 
and the maker of -meditation outlines has often 
been influenced by 'the popular dislike or dogma. 
Perhaps, also, there is a feeling that a medita- 
tion, in order to appeal to the affections, ought to 
contain a large sentimental element, if I may so 
define it. But surely our need, first of all, is to 
know our religion, and not simply to know it by 
intellectual analysis, but to know it in terms of 
our own experience. The great value of medi- 
tation is just here, in the process of translating 
dogma into experience, belief into life. He, 
therefore that would meditate profitably, must set 
about the work of assimilating the dogmatic facts 
of the Christian religion, beginning with the ex- 
istence of God, and passing on through the whole 
of theology. Naturally one would not attempt 
that at a stretch. Subjects of meditation ought 
to be varied, from time to time, but this side of 
the appreciation of dogma ought not to be neg- 



1 6 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

lected. Take a book like Darwell Stone's " Out- 
lines of Dogma," and break it up into fragments 
and translate from terms of the intellect to terms 
of the will and affections. 

4. The revelation of God in Christ, which is 
the subject of Holy Scripture, underlies all the 
material of meditation of which we have been 
speaking. But it has so far been presented to us 
in one or another form of preparation. But 
while the prepared forms have their value, and 
are usually admirable as first steps, we should 
always have before us that the ideal meditation 
will be based directly upon Holy Scripture, with 
no intervening working over the material. We 
should come to the state of experience in medi- 
tation where we should need nothing but our 
Bibles to work with. 

This stage is not easily attained. It is, to be 
sure, easy to take a page from the Gospel, and 
dream over it for half an hour. But it is not 
so easy at the end of the half hour to set down 
any definite thoughts that we have achieved. 
Meditation upon the text of the Bible is difficult, 
because the Bible itself is not easy to understand. 
The understanding of it means close study with 
the use of a considerable apparatus of helps of 
one kind and another. This preparatory study 
the average person is unable or unwilling to do, 



HOW TO MAKE A MEDITATION 1 7 

and hence is unfitted for profitable meditation. 
Moreover the attempt to meditate on the text of 
the Bible is exposed to the same temptation that 
is noted in the case of devotional books, the temp- 
tation to pass from meditation to reading. If 
the plain text of the Bible is to be used either 
(i) easily understood passages from the Gospel 
and Epistles should be chosen; or (2) outlines 
for meditation should be prepared beforehand 
with the aid of commentaries, etc. If there is 
time and ability, the last is, no doubt, the ideal 
form of meditation. 

Assuming now that we have freed our time and 
settled upon a method, etc., what is the actual 
process of meditation? How do you do it? 
First of all comes the preliminary prayer, a defi- 
nite prayer including an invocation of the Holy 
Spirit for the clearing of our minds and the di- 
rection of our intention. This done, we take up 
our first thought. I am going to assume that the 
method will be some modification of the Ignatian 
method, and will begin by presenting the truth 
we are to meditate upon, in some concrete set- 
ting which can be placed before the imagination. 
Let us suppose that we are starting theologically 
and that our theme is the article of the creed, 
He was made man. We might start with a men- 
tal picture of the Nativity at Bethlehem. Then, 



l8 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

with this before the mind, we pass on to recall 
what we know of the Incarnation, or as that is 
rather too extensive for one meditation, we can 
take up one aspect of it. For example that in 
this Child there are two natures perfectly united 
in one Person; that my nature is assumed to the 
Person of God, and that my approach to God is 
through the humanity, which He has assumed. 
This will give me a starting point for personal 
application in that I can examine myself on my 
use of the Sacraments as to the application of the 
Incarnation to me. I can then thank God for the 
gift of them and make acts of contrition for my 
failures and end with a resolution of amendment 
and a final prayer of thanksgiving. 

That roughly enough is what one means by 
meditation. When we analyze it to see just what 
it is that took place, we find three chief elements 
which correspond to the three elements in our 
complex personality. The predominating ele- 
ment which gives the name mental prayer to the 
whole action, is the intellect. We are attempting 
first of all to understand. We want to know 
what a given truth means and what it means to 
us. We want to get life into relation to it. 
That means not thinking abstractedly as in a 
philosophical meditation, but thinking concretely 
about my own life as the sphere in which the 



HOW TO MAKE A MEDITATION 19 

truth acts. The second form of our activity 
comes into view as the result of this application 
of truth to life. It reveals success or failure on 
our part, and consequently, kindles in us love or 
abhorrence. We love God and are grateful to 
Him for His action in our lives, or we realize 
our own failure to respond to Him, and are filled 
with contrition. This is the action of our affec- 
tions in response to what the intellect has shown. 
If this response is any more than mere emotion- 
alism, the result will be the activity of the third 
element in our personality; the will. The will 
becomes active and determines us to follow good 
and to flee evil. 

It would appear from what has been said that 
the practice of mental prayer admits of sufficient 
variety in subject and method, to make it a suit- 
able exercise for any Christian who is sufficiently 
interested in prayer to make this effort. It is 
perfectly true that there are many Christians who 
cannot use mental prayer. These are hard work- 
ing people to whom lack of time is a perfectly 
valid excuse. There are others whose intellectual 
training has not fitted them for meditation. But 
one would do well to pause and think over one's 
circumstances pretty carefully, before one con- 
cludes that one is shut off from all but the least 
developed forms of prayer experience. To vast 



20 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

numbers of Christians, neither ability nor oppor- 
tunity is wanting, but the knowledge of the na- 
ture of this form of prayer or the will to prac- 
tice it. And the attempt, when it is made, ends 
in discouragement and failure. I want, there- 
fore, to say a few words of practical counsel, in 
such cases. 

One of the commonest complaints is that of 
inability to keep the mind fixed. That, of course, 
is not peculiar to meditation, but is a besetting 
trouble of all prayers. It is easy, I think, to over- 
estimate its importance. It is a fact that under 
our educational system very few of us are trained 
in attention. We have not learned deliberately 
to direct and hold attention at a certain point. 
The consequence is that attention follows inter- 
est, and if there is no compelling interest the 
mind which is turned in a certain direction may 
swing off. It is this swing off which is the wan- 
dering mind and which causes the trouble. 
There is nothing for it but to call it back. One 
soon overcomes it, to a certain extent, if one re- 
laxes the attention deliberately for a few seconds 
from time to time and then calls it back with a 
new act of concentration. Furthermore, the 
mind will turn to the most vivid object of inter- 
est It seems distressing that the mind which has 
been fixed on prayer, should be found to have 



HOW TO MAKE A MEDITATION 21 

run off after some matter of wholly trivial inter- 
est. One feels terribly ashamed on discovering 
it. But the mind does not follow what we are 
convinced is our most important interest, or what 
is actually our deepest interest, for which we are 
prepared to sacrifice much, but it follows a vivid 
surface interest, an interest somewhat trivial in 
itself, but which is insistently present. I fancy 
that very few overcome this tendency to wander ; 
we need to deal patiently with ourselves and with 
our infirmities in this matter. 

Another frequent cause of discouragement is 
the seeming fruitlessness of this form of prayer. 
" I have been trying to make meditations," some 
one says, " for so many months or perhaps so 
many years, and I do not seem to gain anything. 
My meditations are wandering and cold nearly 
always." Now I do not believe that the value of 
a meditation depends in any great degree upon the 
facility of it. The meditation which seems to 
make itself, which goes on without difficulty, so 
that we hardly realize the passage of time, is not, 
by any necessity, a better meditation than the 
halting, troubled, wandering one, which it seems 
utterly futile to think of as a spiritual act at all. 
This last is the one which costs labor ; it was less 
pleasant, but it may well have been more profit- 
able. We may well have laid hold of some truth 



22 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

in a manner that will make it a permanent acqui- 
sition, in this last act of prayer. The first may 
have been a superficial experience which vanishes 
as easily as it comes. Never estimate prayer in 
terms of ease and pleasantness. 

And neither should we look to acquire spiritual 
habits with rapidity and ease. Curiously, many 
look to acquire spiritual habits almost over night. 
They turn from a life of sin or indifference and 
spiritual inexperience, and do not understand 
why they do not at once enter into the habits and 
experience of the saints. But certainly the acqui- 
sition of a new center of interest, the withdrawal 
of the affections from their accustomed objects, 
the conversion of the will may be expected to 
take a very considerable time. Spiritual habits 
are slowly built. We may be satisfied if prog- 
ress is being made steadily and unswervingly to- 
ward our end — the knowledge and love of God. 



II 

THE INVITATION TO DISCIPLESHIP 
S. Mark /, 16-18 

Let us listen to the zvords of our Lord: 

Come ye after me, and I will make you to be- 
come fishers of men. 

Let us picture j 

©HIS scene by the sea of Galilee. Our Lord 
had come into Galilee proclaiming the Gos- 
pel of the Kingdom. There was an abruptness 
in the form of the announcement that might well 
startle men : it was as the sudden peal of a trum- 
pet in a camp sunk in sleep. " The time is ful- 
filled." In theory, men had for centuries been 
waiting and watching for this hour. Prophets 
had proclaimed the purpose of God; the religious 
leaders of Israel had exhorted the faithful to hope 
and patience. We have in our minds a picture of 
the waiting and longing Israel. But we may be 
sure that those who waited and longed were few ; 
to the majority the promise had been so long in. 
coming that they had ceased to be expectant, and 
the belief in the coming of God's Kingdom was 

23 



24 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

a belief of no practical value, it contained no 
energy. We, too, are told to be as men expectant, 
standing with girt loins and lit lamps, waiting for 
our Lord's return. But in reality we are not so 
expectant; and we can imagine the effect on 
Christendom if some authentic voice should shat- 
ter its calm with the proclamation: The time is 
fulfilled! Israel had been somewhat shaken out 
of its sleep by the preaching of S. John. The 
preaching of Jesus struck deeper : it was like one 
blow following up another. It rang out with an 
accent of certainty : " The time is fulfilled, and 
the Kingdom of God is at hand : repent ye and 
believe the Gospel." It rang along the shores of 
the sea of Galilee, rousing the fisher-folk and fill- 
ing them with new hope of Israel's deliverance. 
But hardly can they have expected to be called to 
any personal share in the bringing in of the King- 
dom; it would come to them as to all Israel by 
the act of God. And then, this morning, as 
Simon and Andrew were " casting a net into the 
sea," as James and John were " in the ship mend- 
ing their nets," the strange Preacher passed by 
them, and His voice took on a new accent, his 
words were directed to them : " Come ye after 
Me and I will make you to become fishers of 
men." See them hastily leaving their work and 
going after Jesus. 



THE INVITATION TO DISCIPLESHIP 2$ 

Consider, first, 

How quiet and peaceful these men's lives had 
been. They had moved in a narrow circle of 
homely duties. They would, from time to time, 
have made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem — for 
they were pious Israelites. But of what life 
meant in the great world, in Alexandria, in An- 
tioch, in Athens, in Rome, they would have been 
all unknowing. The teaching of the Law, the 
Prophets, and the Psalms would be theirs; they 
would have a certain simple trustfulness in their 
religious leaders; but from the point of view of 
those leaders they were unlearned and ignorant 
men — men little likely to form the foundation 
upon which could be built a great movement of 
religious reform. But so far as we can see, it 
would be just those qualities of simplicity and 
trustfulness — the child-qualities — that would 
commend them to our Lord as material to be used 
in his kingdom-making. Whatever other quali- 
ties they would need in the future could be devel- 
oped from these that they possessed. A little 
farther on in S. Mark's narrative it is said: 
" He ordained twelve, that they should be with 
Him." Therein is the secret of their later power 
— their association with Jesus. But in the mean- 
time Jesus has come into their lives as a revolu- 
tionary force, tearing them loose from their ac- 



26 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

customed moorings, disturbing the calm and peace 
of their lives. The glimpses we get of them are 
those of men increasingly bewildered, not under- 
standing our Lord's teaching or action, able to 
meet successfully no crisis on their own account, 
their faith rarely having the intensity to meet 
the demands made upon it. What then is the 
secret of their power to meet the demands that 
our Lord has to make upon them in the future? 
It was that through their association with Him 
they learned to trust Him with a limitless trust, 
and love Him with a boundless love. They were 
fit instruments to be the builders of His Kingdom 
because they were content to be instruments and 
did not seek to be originators : they were content 
that our Lord should work through them, while 
they contributed only the readiness of their wills. 
Through love and trust they came to the under- 
standing of the supreme secret of spiritual suc- 
cess, that their sufficiency was of God. It is 
when men attempt to supplant that with their own 
sufficiency that they fail. 

Consider, second, 

That we must approach our own vocation to 
follow our Lord in such ways as He shall call us 
in the same spirit, if we are to be successful. We 
must have as the ground of our action a great 



THE INVITATION TO DISCIPLESHIP 27 

trust and a great love. Can we find these quali- 
ties in ourselves? What does our past life show 
to have been its spiritual motives ? It is difficult, 
no doubt, to disentangle our motives so as to see 
them all clearly, and be able to appreciate their 
force one by one: nor is that needful to an ade- 
quate self-appreciation. It requires no exhaus- 
tive self -analysis to find whether we have been 
in the past trusting in our attitude toward our 
Lord. Trust, if it exist, is so obvious a quality, 
that we cannot miss it. The effects of its ab- 
sence — restlessness, fear, doubt, — are widely in- 
fluential. There is always something tentative 
and hesitant about the soul that is not trusting. 
It is uncertain of itself, because it is uncertain of 
its relation to our Lord: it is afraid to lean its 
whole weight upon him : it tries to lean partly on 
him and partly on something else for support. 
Where trust is not, there is no cheerfulness in re- 
ligion : it sinks to the level of drudgery, becomes 
mere task-work. There is no love in it, because 
love cannot exist unless we trust him whom we 
love. Let us, who believe that we have been 
called with the supreme Christian calling — 
" called to be saints " — examine ourselves as to 
the effect that has been produced in us. Has my 
life been rendered peaceful, with a sense of in- 
terior quiet, so that it resists the entrance of any 



28 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

disturbing elements and refuses to listen to dis- 
tracting voices? The fact of vocation certifies 
our Lord's immediate and personal interest in us, 
and our response to vocation measures the extent 
of our appreciation of this. When »we answer 
our Lord's call there is an outgoing of our souls 
toward him, which is an offering of them to the 
embrace of his love. We feel a separation from 
the world, a release from its attraction, a freedom 
of our spiritual powers which permits us gladly 
to direct them to the achievement of new con- 
quests in the Kingdom of Grace. He who has 
answered God's call is filled with the peace and 
joy of God's presence. 

Let us, then, pray, 

For a growing sense of our vocation and a 
more perfect response to it. Pray : that God may 
reveal himself to you through the service to which 
he calls you. 

Almighty and Everlasting God, who makest 
us both to will and to do those things that are 
good and acceptable unto thee; we offer unto 
thee our supplications, beseeching thee so to lead 
us to the knowledge of thy truth and obedience to 
thy will, that out of weakness we may be made 
strong, and that finally we may obtain everlast- 
ing life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 



THE INVITATION TO DISCIPLESHIP 29 

There is great comfort in the thought that runs 
through the New Testament that we are called 
to our place in life. That back of us is neither 
the unintelligence of chance, nor the pitilessness 
of law, but the choice of love. " Thou art about 
my path and about my bed, and spiest out all my 
ways. . . . Thou hast fashioned me behind and 
before and laid thy hand upon me." This 
thought of our election makes us sure of God's 
care; but I like to emphasise this side of it: that 
it ensures that I can always find God. He is not 
a God afar off ; but he is always ready to answer 
when I call upon him. 

The thought of the Apostles would have con- 
tained much about the Messiah and his Kingdom. 
They were of those few who eagerly waited for 
the restoration of Israel. They were waiting and 
watching. And yet, whatever their theory about 
the Messiah, when he actually presented himself 
they had difficulty in accepting him as Messiah. 
He did not come in the form that they expected. 
It is one of our troubles that we make up our 
minds how God is going to act and then find it 
difficult to recognise him in the way he does act. 
It is one thing to dream about the Kingdom, an- 
other to accept our vocation to it. 

To the fishermen of Galilee, wondering about 
John, whether he were the Christ or no, Jesus 



30 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

came with the call to follow him. This call was 
imperative. He offered no explanation of his 
mission. His only promise was the vague one 
that He would make them fishers of men. They 
were to leave all, the father and the nets and 
the boats, the home and all that that meant, their 
means of livelihood, and go out on a life of wan- 
dering of which they saw not the full meaning. 

That is essentially my call. The summons to 
the work of the Kingdom is as real to me as to 
Peter or John. It is as imperative. It comes to 
me as it did to them into the midst of a life of 
fixed interests, of settled occupations, of acquired 
habits. I can no more answer the divine call in 
the negative than they. I cannot reply, " I do 
not see very well how I can break up the routine 
of my life to which I have become accustomed. 
I do not think that I can rearrange the scale of 
my expenditure, or the time-table of my day." 
We are not asked about that. 

The Invitation means that God wants me to do 
something. He has entered my life with a mes- 
sage that I am needed in the work of the King- 
dom. He has singled me out to do a special 
thing. He summons me to act for him. I am 
to drop whatever may interfere with the call ; the 
call comes first. God wants me to do something. 

Have I found out what it is that God wants? 



THE INVITATION TO DISCIPLESHIP 3 1 

Have I considered life — my life — as the field 
of God's activity? Have I listened for the Voice 
of God? Or have I assumed that there is no 
special, personal message for me ? Have I so far 
answered God? 

Let me consider the interests of my life. How 
is my day spent? In one sense, these interests 
have been already fixed for me by the choices that 
I have already made. I am largely committed to 
a certain sort of life. I am married. I have a 
profession. I can no longer move with entire 
freedom because there are others who are con- 
cerned in my life and its actions. Let us assume 
that we have attempted to follow the will of God 
in the choices we have made so far. 

But there remains a certain amount of freedom 
in all life. We are not utterly bound by the past. 
Materially we may be fixed in this place where 
we are, but spiritually we are free to choose. 

We may choose to learn to know more of our 
Lord. Discipleship may be a growing experience 
with us. There are always new secrets in the 
spiritual life, no matter how far any one has 
gone on. 

When Jesus chose twelve to be with him, al- 
though they were earnest men, they were un- 
trained men from the point of view of our Lord's 
purposes. How did he train them? He trained 



2,2 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

them chiefly by association. He kept them with 
him day by day. One fancies that there was 
very little of what we should call formal teach- 
ing. But there would have been constant quiet 
talks, after the day's teaching or preaching was 
over. We catch something of what they would 
be like in his explanation of the Parable of the 
Sower. We wonder sometimes that none of the 
Apostles left us a record of one of those quiet 
evenings spent on a hill-side, or by the shores of 
the lake, while he told them of the Father. S. 
John's Gospel belongs to another sphere of train- 
ing than this elementary one. 

The essence of the training was that they 
should know the Father, and know him as the 
revelation of the Father. On the way to that 
understanding, they would have to give up much 
in the way of prejudices and assumptions which 
had grown out of their previous religious his- 
tory. Their great struggle would have been to 
gain new points of view. Our Lord's teaching 
was constantly striking against their ancestral 
Judaism. We can imagine something of the 
shock when, citing some settled interpretation of 
the Law, He set it aside with His " But I say 
unto you." 

They learned by his life. They watched him 
day by day dealing with the people who flocked 



THE INVITATION TO DISCIPLESHIP 33 

about him. Thus they would learn the value of 
certain qualities such as sympathy, the under- 
standing of another's case and need. They 
would see his kindly attempts to draw out what 
was best in a man or woman, to bring to light 
the faith which would commit itself to him; or, 
on the other hand, the fearless sternness with 
which he dealt with pride and self-righteousness. 

They would have experienced this kindliness 
with which he always treated those who came to 
him trusting him in the highest degree. How 
gentle must have been his touch on life! How 
their lives must have been insensibly shaped by 
almost unnoticed touches upon it! Just a word, 
a look, at the critical moment, would have set 
them right, recalled them to themselves. There 
was that about his person which called out utter 
loyalty and enthusiasm for him. We never read 
of the Apostles being disobedient or resisting. 
Dense, they might be, but never recalcitrant. 

They shared his suffering life. That would 
have meant much in the way of training. It is 
true that none of them had ever led a life in 
which much in the way of self-indulgence was 
possible. But this shelterless, wandering life was 
quite different from the ordinary life of the poor. 
The poor have a settled way of living. Those 
with our Lord shared his homelessness. " The 



34 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." 
There must have been days when the tensity of 
the opposition of the mob, or the threats of the 
authorities, would have made them feel death very 
near. 

All this is not ancient history. There is a 
reality in our possible association with Jesus. 
We can share his life as much as we want to. 
Every one who is trying to lead the ideal life — 
the life which is hid with Christ in God — is 
really sitting at Jesus' feet seeking to learn of 
him. We have his Gospel in our hands and it is 
our fault if we have not a great familiarity with 
him. In all the affairs of life his words come 
back to us, and are our guides in the way of life. 
" We have the mind of Christ " — we are able to 
look at life as he looks at it. 

And for the interpretation of this life of Christ 
and its application to our own needs and circum- 
stances, we have access to the lives of those who 
have lived in the light and strength of it. Think 
what a guide to experience and practice the life 
of S. Paul is. And he is only one of the long 
line of saints whose experiences of Jesus is 
open to us for study. They have found com- 
panionship with our Lord a perfectly possible 
thing. 

It is open to us to associate ourselves with his 



THE INVITATION TO DISCIPLESHIP 35 

sufferings. The call of his life is to a life of 
great simplicity and self-denial. We ought not 
to wait to have this imposed upon us; we ought 
to see that the following of Christ means the fol- 
lowing in the way of discipline and self-losing. 
In most of our lives there are things which pre- 
vent the full manifestation of our Lord. 

It is only by this association that we can be 
prepared for the future. The Apostles faced the 
life after the Ascension in the strength of their 
experience of our Lord. They knew how to live. 

It is experience of Jesus that makes it possible 
for us to face the future with calm. We do not 
know what the future will hold for us. It may 
be joy and comfort: it may be pain and loss. 
But of this we are sure, that if we are faithful 
to our ideals of life it will hold Jesus. He will 
always be there — the friend at the side, ready 
with his help. 

We are finding that so, are we not ? The thing 
that we value most in life is our experience of 
Jesus. We have learned so great confidence in 
him through our having been with him in the 
days that are gone, that we face the days that 
are coming with serenity because we know that 
we shall always find him ready at our call. He 
is not a God afar off, but a God near at 
hand. 



$6 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

And when the day breaks, we shall see him. 
Grant I may so 
Thy steps track here below, 

That in these masques and shadows I may see 

Thy sacred way; 
And by those hid ascents climb to that day 

Which breaks from Thee, 
Who art in all things, though invisibly; 

Show me Thy peace, 
Thy mercy, love, and ease. 

And from this care, where dreams and sorrows 
reign, 

Lead me above, 
Where light, joy, leisure, and true comforts move 

Without all pain. 1 

1 Henry Vaughan. 



Ill 

THE INVITATION TO REPENTANCE 
S. Luke XIX, i-io 

Let us listen to the words of the Gospel: 

And when Jesus came to the place, he looked 
up, and saw him, and said unto him, Zacchaeus, 
make haste, and come down; for to-day I must 
abide at thy house. 

Let us picture, 

^^=^HIS scene that S. Luke puts before us with 
^^y just a few intimate touches. S. Luke, you 
remember, is said to have been something of an 
artist : he had at any rate the artist's power to see 
effectively. We, too, see through the medium of 
his simple narrative. We get the impression of 
the crowds about our Lord; and it brings home 
to us the fact which, perhaps, we commonly over- 
look, of the sensation that our Lord made wher- 
ever he came. The nature of his preaching and 
the mighty works that he did roused men's curios- 
ity to the highest pitch. When the news spread 
of his approach crowds gathered and thronged 

37 



$8 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

him ; he had no time to eat or sleep or pray. Here 
in Jericho we catch the characteristic note of the 
crowd — its selfishness. Every man wanted to 
see, and pushed his way to the front regardless 
of the other man who wanted to see as well. 
Zacchaeus, though he were chief among the pub- 
licans and rich, found that these things availed 
him not — he must push and make his way like 
another. If he had any pride, he must dispose 
of it for the moment; and, indeed, curiosity is a 
stronger stimulant than pride. We see the chief 
among the publicans astride a branch, looking 
with satisfaction over the heads of the crowd — 
looking at Jesus. So this was the man of whom 
so many startling sayings and strange acts were 
reported ! Zacchaeus looks down — with what 
thoughts ? And then Jesus pauses and looks up. 
Their eyes meet! There is a moment in which 
Jesus looks into Zacchaeus 5 soul and sees the man- 
ner of man he is, sees the real Zacchaeus, and the 
possibilities of him. Our Lord has need of this 
man, he can work through him; and Zacchaeus 
has need of our Lord and is in the spiritual state 
of readiness which will respond to him. So the 
call comes : " Zacchaeus, make haste, and come 
down; for to-day I must abide at thy house." 
See the little man climbing down and running 
home and making ready for our Lord. There is 



THE INVITATION TO REPENTANCE 39 

pride, the sense of being distinguished by the cele- 
brated Teacher. There is joy, too : " He re- 
ceived him joyfully." 

Consider, first, 

That Zacchaeus' approach to our Lord is 
prompted by a low motive — curiosity. But hav- 
ing approached our Lord from a low motive, he 
was found capable of responding to higher ones. 
That which is upon the surface of life is not 
always the unerring representative of its depths. 
Few of us would like to be known by our lighter, 
unguarded moments. The real man or woman is 
revealed in response to life's deeper, more search- 
ing appeals. When our Lord called Zacchaeus 
there was no hesitation on the part of the publi- 
can, but he gave himself to our Lord as com- 
pletely as did Simon and Andrew and the sons of 
Zebedee. There was that in our Lord's look and 
voice that drew men to run after him; that sud- 
denly changed their sense of values and caused 
them to think their possessions of no account, so 
they might win his approval. What has laid 
hold upon the spirit of Zacchaeus, chief of publi- 
cans, is the Spirit of Christ, and he at once sees 
the world through new eyes. The Guest who has 
come into his house has come into his soul, too : 
and the result of the entrance is that a new Zac- 



40 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

chaeus is born — a Zacchaeus whose heart is not 
set upon gain, but who struggles to express him- 
self through sacrifice, a sacrifice that shall mark 
the thoroughness of his break with the past and 
the strength of his determination to create for 
himself a future moulded by new motives which 
he begins now to perceive : " Behold, Lord, the 
half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I 
have wrongfully exacted aught of any man, I 
restore him fourfold." The impulse to act, to 
break away from, and so far as possible, destroy 
the past, is the mark of a true repentance. Re- 
pentance cannot be unless there be a change in our 
motives, an altered direction of the currents of 
our lives. Repentance, of all spiritual transac- 
tions, has the most obvious results. There are 
many things we may be uncertain of, but hardly 
of a sincere repentance. Zacchaeus was looking 
at his life through our Lord's eyes; and though 
he knew so little of our Lord, he knew enough to 
perceive how that life must look to him. The 
complacency with which in the past he had, no 
doubt, contemplated his life is changed to abhor- 
rence. He cannot bear to have our Lord see the 
old life, and he makes haste to change it. Think 
of the joy with which he heard our Lord's words 
of approval : " This day is salvation come to 
this house." 



THE INVITATION TO REPENTANCE 41 

Consider, second, 

What led to your conversion? Was there a 
time when you lived in sin, in neglect, in indiffer- 
ence? Was there a crisis in your life when you 
perceived that your state was a state of death, and 
you fled from it in horror? Or did conversion 
mean to you a slowly-growing apprehension of 
our Lord's Presence with you and will for you? 
However that may have been, the essence of the 
spiritual change that came to you was that you 
were turned to Christ. Conversion is our percep- 
tion of and response to a Divine Presence that 
has come into the house of our life and wills to 
abide there. The emphasis may be upon our own 
sinfulness or upon the Divine Goodness; we may 
be more conscious of our need of God, or of 
God's need of us ; but wherever the emphasis fall 
our appreciation of the fact will express itself as 
a need of change. We ought to be other than 
we are. Self-satisfaction will cease to be pos- 
sible — the self-satisfied soul is unfailingly unre- 
pentant. If you are being converted, you are 
continually feeling the need of further change in 
your life; of discarding that which is unworthy, 
of improving that which is well begun, of ad- 
vancing toward a perceived ideal. You want to 
be rid of that in your life which reminds you of 



42 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

an ill past — " Behold, Lord, the half of my goods 
I give to the poor " — which is not so much of a 
new-born love of the poor, as a perception of the 
goods as evidence of a past you would be free of. 
When the Divine Guest enters our house we for- 
get the old complacency with which we regarded 
our furniture and begin to see it as it must appear 
to him. Very tawdry, most of the objects of our 
self-satisfaction appear, when we are conscious 
of Jesus standing in the doorway and looking 
about our soul-house. The ignored imperfec- 
tions start into clearness. That upon which we 
had prided ourselves turns into an object of loath- 
ing. Our clever accomplishments manifest their 
dishonesty, and we make haste to rectify them — 
" If I have wrongfully exacted aught of any 
man, I restore him fourfold.'' It is the prepara- 
tion to receive Jesus, the sweeping and garnishing 
of the house that he may enter in and dwell there ; 
and with it there is a pathetic yearning to hear 
him say : " This day is salvation come to this 
house." The soul that is being converted is hum- 
ble and self -forgetting, and stands with eyes 
downcast, waiting for Jesus to take it to his love. 

Let us, then, pray, 

For the grace of a true conversion. Let us 
pray for grace to break with sin utterly. Pray, 



THE INVITATION TO REPENTANCE 43 

that like Zacchaeus, you may gladly give yourself 
and all that you have to our Lord. 

O Lord Jesus Christ, Co-eternal Word of the 
Father, who didst become like unto us in all 
things, sin only excepted, for the salvation of our 
race, and didst send forth thy Disciples and Apos- 
tles to preach and teach the Gospel of thy King- 
dom, and to cure all sickness and all infirmity 
among thy people; Do thou thyself, O Lord, send 
out thy Light and thy Truth, and enlighten the 
eyes of our minds to understand thy Divine Word. 
Give us grace to be hearers of it, and not hearers 
only, but doers of the Word, that we may bring 
forth good fruit abundantly, and be counted 
worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven. And to 
thee, O Lord, our God, we ascribe glory and 
thanksgiving, saying: Holy, Holy, Holy, Father, 
Son, and Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen. 

It is natural to think that our approach to God 
must be preceded by the purifying process of 
penitence. That is true when we begin to pre- 
pare for definite acts of approach as the recep- 
tion of the Sacraments. 

But before we get so far God approaches us. 
God takes the initiative. " While we were yet 
sinners Christ died for us." " To-day I must 
abide at thy house." 



44 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

The call to discipleship precedes repentance 
and underlies it. If he had not called, we should 
not have come. We are not likely to find our 
need of God, until we have heard of God's need 
of us. 

If we are dealing with Christians we can begin 
with repentance as a necessity in approaching 
God. One who understands anything of the 
meaning of God will understand the need of 
purity in those who present themselves to him. 
But if one is dealing with unbelievers, they must 
first be shown God before they can understand 
the meaning of repentance. 

One reason is that it is only after we have seen 
God that we are able to understand ourselves. 
Our boasting and egotism seem silly when we 
stand before God. 

I am the master of my fate : 
I am the captain of my soul, 

is intolerable to one who has realised his crea- 
turehood and his ceaseless dependence on God. 
Then we can only say " now mine eye seeth thee, 
wherefore I loathe my words, and repent in dust 
and ashes." 

There is much difficulty in making those who 
have always lived in sin understand the meaning 
of sin. When you speak to them of sin they do 



THE INVITATION TO REPENTANCE 45 

not very well understand you. Sin seems to them 
the natural way of life. Their ignorant or dead- 
ened conscience never suggests to them that they 
are in the wrong. They will look about them and 
compare their lives with the lives of others in the 
same social stratum and assert that they are as 
good as others. They are living the life that 
others live. That is true: what they need is to 
be led to see their lives, not in comparison with 
other men, but in contrast with the purity of God. 

What we need is to see our Lord as the ideal, 
and then to feel the compulsion of the ideal. 
What those who are being awakened to repent- 
ance feel is not so much guilt as failure. They 
see what they might have been and it fills them 
with regret: they see what they may yet be and 
it stimulates them to action. 

That God calls us to discipleship will afford an 
ever-deepening motive to preparation. As the 
call of God becomes more pressing, the vision of 
him becomes clearer. We find that we are being 
driven to deeper self-knowledge. There is an 
ever-growing sense of the meaning and need of 
purity. 

Lord, at thy feet my prostrate heart is lying, 
Worn with the burden, weary with the way ; 
The world's proud sunshine on the hills is dying, 



46 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

And morning's promise fades with parting day ; 
Yet in thy light another morn is breaking, 
Of fairer promise, and of pledge more true, 
And in thy life a dawn of youth is waking 
Whose bounding pulses shall this heart renew. 

Oh ! to go back across the years long vanished, 
To have the words unsaid, the deeds undone, 
The errors cancelled, the deep shadows banished, 
In the glad sense of a new world begun ; 
To be a little child whose page of story 
Is yet undimmed, unblotted by a stain, 
And in the sunrise of primeval glory 
To know that life has had its start again. 

I may go back across the years long vanished, 
I may resume my childhood, Lord, in thee, 
When in the shadow of thy Cross are banished 
All other shadows that encompass me: 
And o'er the road that now is dark and dreary, 
This soul made buoyant by the strength of rest, 
Shall walk untired, shall run and not be weary, 
To bear the blessing that has made it blest. 1 

The place of fear in repentance is small. Fear 
does, no doubt, in some cases, lead us to seek a 
way of escape. But ordinarily fear is a sterile 
quality. The true fear that we ought to have is 
the fear to disappoint God. The fear that hav- 

1 Matheson. 



THE INVITATION TO REPENTANCE 47 

ing received so much from him, we should bring 
forth no fruit. 

One of the fruits of repentance is a thing that 
we are often missing. Out of repentance should 
be born joy. " He received him joyfully." We 
shall find this joy if repentance is not to us a per- 
petual weary dealing with our sins, but the mak- 
ing ready of our house to receive the Divine 
Guest. The depression of the penitent comes 
from his self-isolation. I, he thinks, must get 
ready, and then the Guest will come. In reality, 
unless the Guest comes and helps us we cannot 
get ready. We do not repent of our sins and 
come to Jesus: Jesus is the great Penitent who 
comes to us to help us to bear our sins. " Bring 
them to me," he says. We do not even take them 
off and lay them upon him. He lifts them off. 

The joy of the life of penitence is that it is 
lived so intimately with Jesus. We feel so keenly 
our needs and find him so ready to help. As we 
look at him we feel by turns the ignominy of sin, 
shame at having failed him and not been true, 
and the joy of his presence and help, though it 
be a help made necessary by sin. Joy and sorrow 
are the mingled strands of our penitence. 

The true penitent does not want sin; he does 
not deliberately select it. If he falls it is through 
surprise or weakness. What he truly does not 



48 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

cease to want is Jesus. That is why his self- 
examination is so searching; why he wants to 
know himself to the last thought. He is seeking 
to remove whatever in any degree can prevent his 
full joy in Jesus. 

But, you ask, " Do you mean that there is no 
pain about repentance, no sorrow, no shame ? " 
Not at all. 

Has it never happened to you to have to tell one 
whom you very much loved that in some way you 
had wounded that love and proved unworthy of 
it? In the telling there was shame, there was 
intense pain. Shame and pain are there in a 
much higher degree than if you were confessing 
that you had injured one for whom you cared 
nothing. But in the actual experience the shame 
and the pain are transfigured inasmuch as they 
are mingled with love and forgiveness. The love 
burned them up, and in burning them, itself 
burned the brighter. " Now I know how much 
you love me," you said. 

Such repentance finds itself impelled to offer. 
It cannot be content until it has externalised it- 
self. That is what is meant by a penance, an ex- 
ternalisation of the love of the penitent in an 
offering of some sort. That is the impulse to 
many of our good works. They are embodied 
love and therefore pleasing to God. " Behold, 



THE INVITATION TO REPENTANCE 49 

the half of my goods I give unto the poor." 
If our giving sprang out of the sense of having 
received from God, if it was a joyous offering in 
recognition of the love of God manifested in our 
forgiveness, surely good works would be a larger 
element in our experience. Our niggardly giving 
shows small sense of love and gratitude. 

What can I spare ? we say : 
Ah, this and this, 
From mine array 
I am not like to miss : 

And here are crumbs to feed some hungry one: 
They do but grow a cumbrance on my shelf : — 
And yet, one reads, our Father gave his Son, 
Our Master gave himself. 1 

The result of the self-giving of the penitent is 
that salvation is experienced. " This day is sal- 
vation come to this house." To experience sal- 
vation is to find oneself in union with our Lord. 
" My Beloved is mine and I am his." We find 
that the barriers have been broken down and we 
have entered presently in some degree into the 
joy of the Lord. 

Penitence, then, is the clearing of the soul that 
it may have the vision of God. " Let him that 
thirsts to see God, clean his mirror," said Richard 
of S. Victor. 

1 Frederick Langbridge. 



50 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Nothing can stand between the love of the peni- 
tent and its object. Love breaks down all obsta- 
cles, and insists on coming to our Lord. 

The Magdalen at Michael's gate 

Tirled at the pin; 
On Joseph's thorn sang the blackbird, 

" Let her in, let her in ! " 

'* Thou bringest no offering," said Michael, 

" Naught save sin " ; 
Sang the blackbird, " She is sorry, sorry, sorry; 

Let her in, let her in." 

" Hast thou seen the wounds," said Michael, 

° Knowest thou thy sin ? " 
*■ She knows it well, well, well," sang the blackbird ; 

" Let her in, let her in." 

When he had sung himself to sleep, 

And night did begin, 
One came and opened Michael's gate, 

And Magdalen went in. 1 

1 Henry Kingsley. 



IV 

THE INVITATION TO PREPARATION 
S\ Mark VI, 31 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord: 

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves 
apart into a desert place, and rest awhile: for 
there were many coming and going, and they had 
no leisure so much as to eat. 

Let us picture, 

^^^HE Apostles in a desert place alone with 
^^ Jesus. They had just come back from the 
preaching mission on which he had sent them out. 
It was the first work undertaken for him; and 
we can understand that it had been exhausting 
work — so many people to see, so many questions 
to answer, so many new questions that would 
have arisen in their minds the answers to which 
they would be eager to ask Jesus. And when 
they were come to him there was so little oppor- 
tunity to ask him anything — " there were many 
coming and going," — all the bustle of a city's 

51 



52 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

life. So Jesus, knowing their mind, leads them 
out to be alone with him. Try to see them sitting 
about our Lord — resting. There is quiet here 
in the desert place — and peace. It was, per- 
haps, some hill-slope to which they had climbed 
after leaving the " ship " in which they came. 
They could look down on the levels at the shore 
where the " green grass " shone in the sunlight 
and the sparkling waters of the lake rippled upon 
the shore. In the distance there were the fishers' 
boats which were already following them. It 
was to be but a brief rest, for the people had 
heard where Jesus was gone and were coming 
after him. But there was a little space in which 
they might look at Jesus and hear his words. 
One fancies them impatient of the intrusive 
crowds which were to break up their day of 
retreat. By this time they wanted teaching 
which was not such as our Lord gave to the 
multitude — teaching which was for themselves 
alone; with a more intimate note of self-revela- 
tion, with an unfolding of the mysteries of the 
Kingdom which it was theirs alone to receive. 
They must have hungered for such quiet hours 
when Jesus dropped the parable and spoke to 
them plainly of the Father, of his own mission, 
of the Kingdom. Even though the truths that 
he unveiled to them were only half grasped, they 



THE INVITATION TO PREPARATION 53 

would lie in their minds as things to be pondered 
over, to be talked of among themselves in many 
an after hour — treasures hid in a field the mean- 
ing of which would be found in later days when 
the Spirit would bring to their remembrance all 
the things that Jesus had spoken unto them. 

Consider, first, 

That while every word and act of our Lord 
would add to their knowledge of him ; each new 
parable and miracle, each new display of his 
power or manifestation of his mercy contributing 
to build up their many-sided experience of him; 
yet it would be in the hours of more intimate 
intercourse that they would come to learn his 
secret. It would be the words spoken while they 
were with him in the way, or when they 
were gathered about him in the house after the 
day's ministry was over, or on the rare days when 
he led them apart into the solemn silence of the 
wilderness, which would make known to them, as 
far as they were able to receive it, the hidden 
purpose of his coming. Gradually the conviction, 
not only of his greatness, his purity, his Divine 
Mission, but of his difference was growing upon 
them. As the Gospel-story unfolds there comes 
into the narrative of their intercourse with him a 
sense of deepening mystery and awe. There is a 



54 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

shade of perplexity that we had not felt before — 
a sense of a far-reaching meaning in our Lord's 
acts and words which they cannot follow — " we 
cannot tell what he sarin." What they were be- 
ing trained to was not so much to catch more read- 
ily the meaning of his words, as to trust more ab- 
solutely himself. Their power of apprehension 
often fails, but their faith grows limitless. Then, 
too, in the later days of his ministry we feel that 
the Apostles were more alone with our Lord. 
He held himself more aloof from the crowd and 
opened his mind more to his followers. And if 
in these days his difference from them was more 
sharply accentuated, the intensity of his love was 
more keenly felt. If they seemed to understand 
less, they had reached a capacity for deeper love 
and sympathy. We feel that it was through their 
experience of our Lord in these latter days of his 
earthly life that they were being awakened in 
spiritual capacity — that they were being trans- 
formed from the simple men they had been to men 
able to respond to the demands for heroic service 
which their future life was to bring them. To 
have lived with our Lord through Passion and 
Holy Week must have left them so deeply marked 
with the Cross that, however at moments they 
may have failed, its vision of love and sacrifice 
would be theirs forever. We are unable to think 



THE INVITATION TO PREPARATION 55 

of them as ever permanently falling back to earlier 
ideals of life. 

Consider, second, 

That we are called to prepare ourselves for the 
service for which our Lord may need us. We 
are never sure of the details of that service, of 
what the future may hold in the way of divine de- 
mands upon our lives, but we are sure that there 
will be service of some sort for him. We know 
too that the mode of preparation is through inti- 
macy with him. We must accustom ourselves to 
go apart with him into the desert place where, 
separated from life's distracting bustle, we may 
listen undisturbed to the words that he speaks. 
For the greater part of our time we are in the 
thick of life's business, where there are many 
coming and going. The confusing pressure of 
necessary occupations, the thronging claims upon 
our time and attention, the unavoidable drain upon 
our energy, make it imperative that we rescue time 
for recollection and silence. Under our modern 
conditions we find it difficult to gain a minimum of 
time. When we have rescued a few moments for 
ourselves we find that it is only the body that we 
have led aside — the mind remains in life's mar- 
ket-place where the busy thoughts come and go. 
What real intercourse with our God is possible 



56 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

for us modems who are born into an environment 
which consumes life in a series of external activ- 
ities ; which regards quiet, silence, recollection, as 
the synonyms of sloth, and cracks the whip of 
contempt over idlers in prayer and meditation? 
How can we maintain any thought of spiritual 
things, not to say any Vision of God ? The strug- 
gle to maintain any spiritual level of thought and 
life is tremendous : but the issues too are tremen- 
dous — we must succeed, or remain spiritual 
dwarfs and weaklings, incompetent servants and 
faithless citizens in the Kingdom of our Father. 
We cannot so much as live spiritually to any 
purpose unless we live in the grace of our Lord 
Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellow- 
ship of the Holy Ghost. Are you insisting that 
your life shall be a life spiritually based — a life 
hid with Christ in God? Are you battling with 
the ever-encroaching materialism of life that there 
may be time and place for the development of your 
spiritual faculties ? We need Christ — need him 
sorely — in our daily traffic in the market-place : 
but if we would have him with us there we must 
learn of him in the wilderness whither he calls us 
to come with him; where we can sit at his feet 
and look into his eyes and listen to his teaching, if 
it be but for an hour snatched now and then away 
from the crowds that hasten after and steal from 



THE INVITATION TO PREPARATION 57 

us our precious peace. Ministry is a great thing 
and a glorious; but can we minister unless we 
have first been alone with Jesus and learned the 
Gospel from his lips? 

Let us, then, pray, 

For opportunities to be alone with Jesus. Pray 
him to lead you out into the desert place and there 
make himself known to you. Pray for strength 
to command your time. 

O Lord Jesus Christ, who didst say to the 
Disciples, Come ye apart into a desert place and 
rest awhile: Grant, we beseech thee, to thy 
servants now gathered together, so to seek thee 
whom our souls desire to love, that we may both 
find thee and be found of thee; and grant that 
such love and such wisdom may accompany the 
words spoken in thy Name, that they may not 
fall to the ground, but may be helpful in leading 
us onward through the toils of our pilgrimage to 
that rest that remaineth, where nevertheless they 
rest not day nor night from thy perfect service, 
who livest and reignest God forever and ever. 

It brings home to us the practical wisdom of 
our Lord's dealing with his disciples to find him 
providing for a time of rest. Any life which is 
subjected to a constant strain must relax at times 



58 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

or else break. Our Lord himself found the need 
of times of silence when he could be alone with 
the Father. Even he could not give out all the 
time; he must spend time in recruiting his 
strength. 

It is not idleness that the tired man needs so 
much as change. Relief comes through the 
change of direction in activities. When we are 
world-weary, and our nerves are exhausted in 
dealing with others, or our muscles are exhausted 
in the daily work, the best remedy is spiritual 
activity. If we can turn away for a time from 
whatever has been occupying us and turn our- 
selves to God and consider our relation to him, 
we shall find refreshment. 

In the strain to which the Apostles were sub- 
jected, and still more in view of the strain to 
which they were in the future to be subjected, 
such times of pause must have been an essential 
part of their training. One imagines that our 
Lord provided for them such times more fre- 
quently than has been recorded. 

In these days in which we have to live, the pres- 
sure of the world on life is tremendous. There 
are indeed many coming and going, and any mo- 
ments of quiet have to be snatched as we can. 
The speeding up process in modern industrial life, 
we are told, is responsible for a great increase in 



THE INVITATION TO PREPARATION 59 

the number of accidents. Attention and alert- 
ness give way under the strain. The like un- 
doubtedly happens in our spiritual experience. 
Many of our failures could be avoided ; they occur 
because we do not take time to be sure of what we 
are doing — time to consider whether what life 
is presently offering us is a temptation or an op- 
portunity. 

To meet life sanely and collectedly we need 
preparation. We must estimate what we have to 
meet and how we are to meet it. We fail to do 
this, and then are surprised at our failure in some 
crisis. But we made no preparation to meet any 
crisis. We did not seek to accumulate strength 
through communion with our Lord. We did not 
seek to clear and illumine our judgment through 
meditation on his word and will. We did not 
practice ourselves in eager service. How can an 
inert Christian expect to meet a sudden demand 
for action? How can an ignorant Christian ex- 
pect to decide the questions which fall to be de- 
cided from day to day, to meet attacks, objec- 
tions, inquiries? 

We can not be far wrong if we say that our 
spiritual success in dealing with practical prob- 
lems, is based on the times that we spend apart 
with God. I of course include in this estimate 
the time we spend in our prayers. In very oc- 



60 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

cupied lives this time for prayer needs to be 
guarded with great jealousy. We need to learn 
how much can be accomplished in a few moments, 
if we have the power of concentration. We can 
do much in five minutes — for we are not heard 
for our much speaking. Are you skilled in util- 
ising the little breaks in the day which give you 
a few moments' free time? Can you pray any- 
where, in any position, under any circumstances 
where there are moments of quiet? 

Much of life comes for us as a surprise. If 
we are to meet it effectually, we must be habitu- 
ally prepared. On the other hand, many of the 
events of life can be foreseen and prepared for. 
Everyone knows whether he has to choose a pro- 
fession or not; his education is supposed to be 
preparing him for it. But how often do we find 
any one spiritually preparing for his life's work? 
A boy is to study law or medicine — are his 
parents anxious about the spiritual preparation 
of the years which lead up to it? What prepara- 
tion is visible in modern life for marriage? Are 
parents spiritually fit to assume the care of chil- 
dren ? 

Some one is perhaps thinking that a great many 
things happen which do not show on the surface. 
How can one know what has been the prepara- 



THE INVITATION TO PREPARATION 6 1 

tion for a wedding, for example ? Well, the kind 
of wedding that is commonly preferred tells some- 
thing, — the preference for a social show over a 
mass, for instance. 

One gathers something also of the course of 
people's spiritual thought in the things they ask 
prayers for. There is a curiously conventional 
routine about that. There seem to be certain, not 
very important, things that it is customary to ask 
prayers for, and there is very little variation. 

The foundations of the spiritual life need to 
be laid very deep if they are to bear the weight 
of the superstructure which we are to erect upon 
them. Is it not true that much of the foundation- 
laying of character, in religious education and so 
forth, is pitifully superficial? Go down the street 
and watch the way the foundations of a sky- 
scraper are laid; and then think of the spiritual 
education of any children you may happen to 
know. 

Any one to whom the spiritual life seems a mat- 
ter of vital importance will try to find special times 
of rest and retirement during the year. 

There is the long retreat which is now offered 
so widely by our different sisterhoods. This is 
invaluable, and probably oftener possible than we 
imagine. Three days of utter quiet and rest with 



62 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

God, amid surroundings which help us to realise 
the divine Presence, give just the spiritual tonic 
that most of us need. 

Then there is the Quiet Day. So many of these 
are offered each year that no one who really wants 
to make the day's retreat need fail to do so. If 
such a quiet day is to be profitable at all it must 
be entered upon as a spiritual work we are under- 
taking with all seriousness. One sometimes feels 
that people are running about to Quiet Days, very 
much as they run about to hear favorite preach- 
ers, and are just listening, and saying, " How 
wonderful ! " and doing nothing else. 

Failing either the Retreat or the Quiet Day, it 
is often possible to make one's own retreat, either 
in one's home, or in some Convent or Retreat 
House. In the latter, one can have the advantage 
of guidance; but it is quite possible to gain all the 
spiritual rest and advantage at home, if one takes 
the trouble to secure the requisite isolation. Of 
these perhaps only partial Quiet Days it ought to 
be possible to keep several during the year. 

I may seem to repeat, but it cannot be insisted 
on too strongly that our capacity to meet life 
christianly depends on our having first met God. 
This is not true only of supreme vocation, such as 
the Religious Life, but it is true of any life. The 
man cannot stand the strain of business, the 



THE INVITATION TO PREPARATION 63 

woman the strain of family life, without that. 
But you say, perhaps, they do. I do not think so. 
They meet life in terms of materialism, and in 
terms of materialism are successful. But they 
are not successful in terms of the Sermon on the 
Mount. I am speaking only of life whose ideal is 
spiritual. 

It is in these times of quiet and recollection 
that we develop in the friendship of our Lord. 
We can imagine that the Apostles, gathered about 
our Lord in some desert place where they had at 
last found stillness, would learn more of him than 
they would in many days amid the crowds. 
Then, too, it was there that they would have the 
opportunity to assimilate what had been the im- 
pressions of the other days. 

That wonderful quality of friendliness toward 
our Lord that we find in the Saints is the outcome 
of the long, quiet hours of spiritual intercourse 
which have been at the bottom of their experience 
of him. 

All this that I am saying about the need of quiet 
is not a counsel of perfection; it is a necessity if 
we are to have any more than a very elementary 
spiritual experience. " I think God will accept 
me if I do my duty." That, of course, always 
means, "If I do not do my duty, but something 
that I fancy will do just as well. And it is not to 



64 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

the point in any case, since it is not a question of 
salvation that we are dealing with, but a ques- 
tion of spiritual growth and maturity. It is a 
question of Christ being formed in us. There are 
those who want religion on the lowest terms, there 
are others who are looking for a cheap religion. 
We are concerned with neither. 

The loving care of our Lord is shown in his 
invitation. He is willing to give us personal at- 
tention. He will be with us in our times of 
retirement as truly as he was with the Apostles 
when he led them apart. 

Again and again we feel the need of this rest 
with our Lord, and have not the power or the 
determined will to gain it. The nerves become 
strained, the mind will not work any more at the 
problems we have to face, we are ready to sink 
under the burden of life. Then is the time we 
want the quiet with God. Then we want to find 
the heaven that is about us here — to pass out of 
the storm into the harbor. 

And I would be where no storms come, 
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, 
And out of the swing of the sea. 



V 

THE INVITATION TO EXPERIENCE 
6\ John I, jp 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord: 

He saith unto them, Come and see. They came 
and saw where he dwelt, and abode with him that 
day ; for it was about the tenth hour. 

Let us picture, 

JOHN BAPTIST and his two disciples, 
" looking upon Jesus as he walked." It 
was in Bethabara, beyond Jordan, the day fol- 
lowing our Lord's baptism. S. John Baptist's 
ministry culminated in his witness to our Lord: 
" Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the 
sin of the world." We can imagine the feelings 
of these two disciples whose hopes had been 
kindled at the fire of S. John's preaching, when 
they heard his announcement. We see them 
standing there by S. John as Jesus passes; and 
then, as though an unseen power had laid hold 
upon them, they turn abruptly from S. John and 
follow Jesus. What drew them? A new-born 

65 



66 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

expectancy that in this man was the hope of Israel, 
an inrush of conviction that, they must know more 
of him? Yes; and this expectancy would pass 
into a faith which would deepen and become inex- 
tinguishable as they came to understand that the 
hope of Israel was also the hope of humanity, 
and that it was theirs to be gathered into and made 
partakers of his work. The Holy Spirit of Jesus 
was drawing them that they might run after him. 
Jesus was conscious of their coming. He is al- 
ways conscious of our slightest movement toward 
him: he does not wait for us to reach him, he 
comes to meet us. See him turning and asking, 
" What seek ye ? " Their answer betrays how 
little they themselves knew their motive ; they are 
unable to put into words the dim hope that was 
in their souls. Instead they ask, what they were 
not at all seeking, " Rabbi, where dwellest thou? " 
One fancies that our Lord smiled a little at their 
question, and then followed it with his invitation, 
" Come and see." See them following our Lord 
as he led them to the place where he dwelt ! It is 
surprising to us to learn that he dwelt anywhere. 
But indeed he was seeking a new dwelling — seek- 
ing that he might dwell in their hearts by faith. 
While they abide with him that day, wondering, he 
is entering into them to abide forever. 



THE INVITATION TO EXPERIENCE 6? 

Consider, first, 

The spiritual alertness of these disciples of S. 
John Baptist. We feel, do we not? as we read 
the story in the Gospel of S. John, that the circle 
that surrounded the Baptist was all athrob with 
expectancy; an expectancy that his preaching 
aroused till it widened out in great waves which 
did not sink to peace till they had rippled on the 
placid surface of Pharisaic self-control. Near 
the center the spiritual disturbance was great. 
Men's hearts were aglow with new hopes — hopes 
that were ready to energise into action. To them 
there was nothing* final about S. John — he him- 
self pretended to no finality. He was only the 
herald of the dawn: and his intimate disciples 
were eagerly awaiting the events which should 
explain and justify his ministry. Therefore it 
was, this day, that the words of the Baptist set 
them running after Jesus. Their spiritual in- 
stinct, which was none other than the voice of the 
Holy Spirit, turned them to Jesus as the answer 
to all the questions that the Baptist had raised. 
Consider, that it was their need of Jesus that sent 
them to him — the restlessness that had come 
upon their spirits sought rest in him. The human 
teacher had done what he could — aroused desire; 
but no human teacher can satisfy desire. He can 



68 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

only point beyond himself as S. John did. He 
must always warn his disciples, " There is one that 
cometh after me," and the disciple must press on 
from the teacher to the Coming One. These two 
disciples sitting at the feet of Jesus in the place 
where he dwelt, through all the remaining hours 
of the day, are forever the type of those who have 
found. All that they need is in Jesus : henceforth 
they have only to drink from this inexhaustible 
source. The hours of that day, we know, must 
have passed all too quickly; but though the day 
passed, Jesus did not pass. He never again 
passed out of their lives, but passed into them, 
where he still dwells and will dwell forever. 
Their unmeaning question has found unexpected 
answer. They have found where he " dwelt " ; 
and there, their labors over, they too dwell. 
Where he is, there are his servants also. 

Consider, second, 

The two disciples who followed Jesus were 
acting upon the rule that he himself was to lay 
down for the guidance of our lives : " Ask and 
ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find; knock, 
and it shall be opened unto you." This is the law 
of spiritual experience, a law which has been veri- 
fied by all the saints. Have you verified it ? — 
for each one must verify it for himself. No man 



THE INVITATION TO EXPERIENCE 69 

can find the truth of Jesus for another : all he can 
do is to point out something of the way. The 
Way itself, which is Christ, we must walk in step 
by step, building our own personal experiences as 
we go, till from the Cross-crowned summit of 
some Calvary we see the City spread before us in 
bewildering beauty, and hasten toward it across 
the intervening Valley of the Shadow. To know 
Christ and be known of him — that is the mean- 
ing of our pilgrimage. It is fundamental that 
we be spiritually alert, eager, insistent; that we 
ask, seek, knock. We must learn to use each 
scrap of spiritual experience we gain as the 
vantage-point from which to go on to deeper ex- 
periences. Each experience of our Lord is in- 
deed a revelation — a revelation that reveals more 
than itself, that reveals possibilities before unper- 
ceived. All spiritual experiences are related, and 
we cannot have one without some glimpse of 
others : we cannot have one prayer answered with- 
out gaining light upon the whole meaning of 
prayer; we cannot possess our Lord in one com- 
munion without being lifted to some knowledge 
of what it means to live in him. Spiritual experi- 
ence spreads through life, consuming its darkness, 
as the sun drives its light into the valley, shatter- 
ing the over-hanging mists. The light of the sun 
is force; and the illumination of the Spirit is 



JO THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

force — vital force energising all that it touches. 
Has your relation to our Lord resulted in a re- 
lease of spiritual power from him, unlocking the 
power of his spirit so that it surges out over- 
washing the dry places of your life, and changing 
the tiny streamlets of your spiritual activity to 
deep-flowing streams of conscious power? 

Let us, then, pray, 

For an ever-growing experience of our Lord. 
Pray, for energy to go " from strength to 
strength." 

Almighty God, who didst give such grace unto 
thy holy Apostles, that they readily obeyed the 
calling of thy Son Jesus Christ, and followed him 
without delay; Grant unto us all, that we, being 
called by thy holy Word, may forthwith give up 
ourselves obediently to fulfil thy holy command- 
ments ; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Our Lord frankly offers himself to the test of 
our experience. God has done that all along. 
" Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God : ask it 
either in the depth, or in the height above. ,, 
" Prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, 
if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and 
pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be 
room enough to receive it." And so our Lord : 



THE INVITATION TO EXPERIENCE Jl 

" Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I 
am meek and lowly of heart ; and ye shall find rest 
for your souls." " If any man willeth to do his 
will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it be 
of God, or whether I speak from myself." " If 
thou canst believe, all things are possible to him 
that believeth." 

The striking thing about these offers of God is 
that they are so rarely accepted. God challenges 
us to try him and we decline. That was the 
course of Ahaz : " I will not ask, neither will I 
tempt the Lord." It sounds very pious — as 
though we were leaving everything in God's 
hands. In truth we are avoiding knowing the 
will of God because we have a very shrewd sur- 
mise that it is quite contrary to what we want to 
do. 

Men are continually declaiming about the dif- 
ficulties of belief; of the unreasonableness of 
being asked to believe what they cannot under- 
stand. And all the time God is offering to lead 
us to the understanding of truth in the only way 
that it can be understood, that is by experience of 
it. Some one may tell us about the fragrance of a 
lily, but we only understand what it is when we 
have smelled it. So we can be told about the for- 
giveness of sins, but we only find the truth of the 
words in the joy of absolution. 



J2 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

It is notable that when our Lord calls his dis- 
ciples he does not attempt to explain to them the 
nature of their vocation. He asks them to come 
and associate themselves with his life and work. 
It is only thus that they can come to understand 
what the Kingdom of God means. He offers 
himself as the proof of his mission. They must 
have confidence in him, must take him for what 
they have so far found him. The test that he 
later lays down for the judgment of others he 
now submits to himself. " By their fruits ye 
shall know them." Such a course requires the 
initial venture of faith. 

The case is not essentially different to-day. 
As we each one face the Christian Religion as a 
personal call to us, and consider our answer, we 
have to pass by the same road from faith to ex- 
perience. The Christian Religion has not been in 
such wise demonstrated in the centuries of the 
past that we can be excused from the venture of 
faith. It is not possible, as a preliminary to 
acceptance of belief in God, to sit down in a study 
and work out a consistent theory of the uni- 
verse that shall be in all respects satisfactory, and 
then accept God as the conclusion of a process of 
demonstration. If the Christian Religion is pro- 
posed to us, it is useless to try to settle all the 
questions that can be raised and answer all the 



THE INVITATION TO EXPERIENCE 73 

objections any one can think of, before we make 
up our minds. The only final demonstration is 
the demonstration of experience. The prelim- 
inary question we have to answer is : Is there 
enough evidence to justify me in making experi- 
ment ? Are the issues involved important enough 
to demand that I shall act on such evidence as I 
have? 

Whether one be approaching Christianity for 
the first time, or approaching a more advanced 
stage of it than one has as yet attained to, it is 
sufficient that one see : — 

I. The promise of Christianity. That it is a 
religion that claims to reveal to us God. There 
are many religions that have offered us knowledge 
of God, and if we have tested them we have found 
them failures. Here is another offer, — an offer 
to show us that God is a loving Father. It offers 
to deal with the sin that we feel is stamping our 
lives with failure, and to reveal to us a Saviour 
who will rescue us from the guilt and the power 
of sin. 

II. That as ground for action it offers us the 
history of the Christian community for almost 
two thousand years. That history contains the 
assertion by unnumbered multitudes that they 
have tested the promises of Christianity and 
found them true. That they have, in fact, found 



74 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

God as Father, Saviour and Sanctifier. They 
have found that the promises of the Gospel are 
utterly true. 

That would seem to be a sufficient justification 
for committing oneself to a test of the doctrine 
to find whether or not it is of God. 

Of course one cannot (and that is one peculiar- 
ity of Christianity) test Christ's Religion in de- 
tachment and in the spirit of an experimenter. It 
cannot be demonstrated in a laboratory and then 
accepted. It can only be tested by complete self- 
committal. One has to make experiment in the 
spirit of Abraham who went out from his native 
land relying on the word of God alone. From 
experiment to experience is the law; but the ex- 
periment is not the experiment of the scientist, but 
of the lover. 

We talk much of the scepticism which with- 
holds from the acceptance of Christianity. That 
is indeed a lamentable fact. But in my experi- 
ence the deeper foe of Christianity is that scepti- 
cism of the Christian which withholds from the at- 
tempt to master the higher reaches of Christian 
experience. There are so many who seem quite 
content to live in the lower ranges of spiritual ex- 
perience and practice. But it is really only in the 
higher reaches of experience that Christianity 
justifies itself. It is not justified by the great 



THE INVITATION TO EXPERIENCE 75 

body of nominal Christians who interpret Chris- 
tianity as a good moral life, and even so, mean 
by moral life not a Christian life, but a life con- 
formed to the conventional morals of the time 
and place where they live. The justification of 
Christianity is not that it makes this world better, 
— that it is of solid worth in the development of 
society. Christianity is justified by the men and 
women on the outposts who have found its sig- 
nificance in a life of sanctity. It is justified in 
the experience of the experimenters who take 
risks. 

The mass of mankind do not pass their time in 
making experiments. They cannot be expected to 
do so. They are content to take the results ar- 
rived at by the experimenters and appropriate 
them to their use. The solid merchant gets rich 
by the exploitation of the results of scientific re- 
search. He absorbs acquired results but makes 
no contribution. The advance is made by the 
men who spend their lives in experimentation. 

The Saints are the chemists, the prospectors, 
the explorers of spiritual humanity. They are 
the men who take our Lord at his word and push 
out into the deep. They trust themselves to the 
great promises of the Gospel, and their trust has 
been justified. 

There is this difference: you can make use of 



j6 1HE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

the discoveries of the chemist or the biologist 
without becoming a chemist or a biologist your- 
self; but you can only fully use the discoveries 
of the Saints by walking in the same way that 
they walked. When you will have used their 
method fully you will yourself have become even 
as they. 

The advantage that you and I have is that the 
country which we are invited to traverse is no 
untravelled wilderness. We go after our Lord. 
We go by paths that have been trodden into ex- 
treme visibility by the oft-repeated passage of the 
Saints. We are not seeking some fountain of 
youth, some El Dorado, on the basis of vague 
reports. We are travelling toward a goal that 
has been reached over and over again. Those 
who tell us, know. " Whither I go ye know, and 
the way ye know." 

The very greatness of the promises sometimes 
stagger us. We are invited into union with the 
Incarnate Life of God. That is so great and 
wonderful a thing that our imagination fails us, 
and we do not lay hold of the truth. But the old 
saying is true, that God became man that man 
might become divine. The worst kind of un- 
faith is un faith in the possibilities of our own 
nature as it is renewed in Christ. 



THE INVITATION TO EXPERIENCE JJ 

The soul wherein God dwells, — 
What Church could holier be? — 

Becomes a walking tent 
Of heavenly majesty. 

How far from here to heaven? 

Not very far, my friend, 
A single, hearty step, 
Will all the journey end. 

Though Christ a thousand times 

In Bethlehem be born, 
If He's not born in thee, 

Thy soul is still forlorn. 

The cross on Golgotha 

Will never save thy soul, 
The cross in thine own heart 

Alone can make thee whole. 



Hold thou ! where runnest thou ? 

Know heaven is in thee — 
Seek'st thou for God elsewhere, 

His face thou'lt never see. 

O, would thy heart but be 
A manger for His birth; 

God would once more become 
A child upon the earth. 



78 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Go out, God will go in, 

Die thou — and let Him live. 

Be not — and He will be. 

Wait and He'll all things give. 

O, shame, a silk-worm works 
And spins till it can fly, 

And thou, my soul, wilt still 
On thine old earth-clod lie ? x 
1 Anon. 



VI 

THE INVITATION TO DISCIPLINE 
S. Mark X, 21 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord: 
Come, take up thy Cross, and follow me. 

Let us try to picture, 

^^^HIS young ruler running along the road to 
^^^ meet Jesus. He had heard so much of 
Jesus, and what he had heard had filled him with 
longing to know more of him, to be with him. 
He had nothing to do; his wealth had set him 
free; and he would give his time, his strength, 
to learn the secret of which Jesus was possessed. 
See him now kneeling at the feet of Jesus and 
asking, " Good Master, what shall I do to inherit 
eternal life?" It was no low ideal or longing 
for commonplace things that brought him to our 
Lord. There was a great ambition in his soul, 
and one which, so far as he was able to see him- 
self, was perfectly honest. He had been living a 
religious life; he had submitted to the restraints 
of the commandments — a difficult thing for a 

79 



80 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

wealthy youth. And his religion was not the 
round of a decorous habit; we feel, do we not? 
the glow of a fine enthusiasm behind his words; 
we see a face looking into the face of Jesus which 
is lit by the light of a pure desire. He was real 
as far as he knew himself — though that was not 
very far. So " Jesus beholding him, loved him " : 
loved him, and would have him for his disciple. 
See those looking into each other's face, seeing 
the light in each other's eyes. How near this 
young man is to achieving his ambition, to the 
attainment of eternal life ! But there is one thing 
that had not entered into his mind : that eternal 
life is purchased by sacrifice, that between him 
and it stretches the Way of the Cross. Hear 
Jesus proposing this way to him : " One thing 
thou lackest : Go thy way, sell whatsoever thou 
hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have 
treasure in heaven ; and come, take up thy Cross, 
and follow me." So the love of Jesus proposes, 
offering itself as the way to the knowledge of the 
Father and union with him. Watch the light die 
out of the young man's face, till he stands as some 
stricken thing as the meaning of the invitation 
sinks into his soul. See his head droop on his 
breast ; see him turn away from Jesus and retrace 
with hesitating steps the way that he had come — 
running. See him going into the distance, sad 



THE INVITATION TO DISCIPLINE 8l 

and grieved. And see Jesus watching him go. 
" He had great possessions " ; but the greatest of 
all, the love of Jesus, he threw away, that he 
might keep his gold. 

Consider, first, 

That the wealth that set him free to follow 
Jesus, bound him to the world so that he could 
not follow. Perhaps he had conceived that fol- 
lowing our Lord would mean greater expenditure, 
the adding of some new practises to life, a certain 
change in his habits ; but he had not imagined it 
as the adoption of a naked, wandering life, depend- 
ent on the charity of others. He had perhaps 
thought that he was making an experiment from 
which it was easy to turn back — but you could 
not turn back with all your money gone. Up to 
this time he had not felt his riches as a bar to 
the approach to God ; rather, no doubt, he had re- 
garded them as a mark of the divine favor. 
When a picture of life without them was placed 
before him he saw for the first time what riches 
were to him. He had thought of them as giving 
liberty to use his life as he would, but they turn 
out to be a severe limitation of his liberty; they 
prevent him from willing any radical change in 
life. He could do anything with riches, but he 
could not do without them. It was revealed that 



82 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

his final trust was in riches and not in God. 
There was that in his life which he held more im- 
portant than God. He had blundered sadly about 
himself : he did not really want eternal life, for to 
want eternal life is to want God alone and before 
all things. So the invitation that he had solicited, 
he declines. The love of Jesus that he had called 
out, he disappoints. For it was not only the 
young man that was sorrowful ; Jesus was sorrow- 
ful too. Jesus had called him because he loved 
him; the test which he offered was the test of 
love. The impulse of love is toward sacrifice. 
The Apostles had left all to follow Jesus. There 
were holy women following who ministered to 
him of their substance, who would gladly have 
given all if he had asked it. But the young man 
failed where they had succeeded; and we cannot 
but feel that the difference was not in the differing 
amounts of their possessions, but that at the heart 
of the young man's action was not the impulse of 
love, but of ambition, of self-seeking. He sought 
to please Jesus, to make himself important to 
Jesus; Jesus was not the passion of his life. He 
had not the simplicity and selflessness of the Gali- 
lean fishermen to whom to be with Jesus was more 
than all the world. They were content to follow 
him in any way, even the Way of the Cross. 



THE INVITATION TO DISCIPLINE 83 

Consider, second, 

All the invitations of Jesus are the expressions 
of his love; they are invitations to be with him, 
to be near him. And it is love alone that will 
enable us to answer. The Way of the Cross that 
we are invited to, is an impossible way to traverse 
under the impulse of aught save love. That is 
why so many find it hard, wearisome, exacting — 
they are attempting to walk it under other leading 
than that of love. Those multitudes who are 
born into the Body of Christ, and one by one fall 
by the wayside as life goes on, fall because they 
are not lovers. They had the religion of habit, 
of inheritance, of duty; but the banner over them 
was never love. Therefore the Cross weighed 
and chafed; its constant demands for new sacri- 
fices grew irksome; the vision of what they were 
losing smote them to self-pity. The day came 
when they questioned whether they were not pay- 
ing too great a price for our Lord's favor; 
whether after all, it was necessary to pay the 
whole world for one's soul : and they threw down 
the Cross, and left the way and made the great re- 
fusal. What has been your case? Our Lord's 
will that you should follow him has been made 
known to you. The Cross has been offered. 
You have heard him saying, Go, sell — perhaps 



84 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

not earthly possessions, though he says that oft- 
ener than we like to think — but some item of 
your willing, some loved and prized thing, some 
love that divides your allegiance, some habit that 
holds you to self-pleasing and self-indulgence. 
There is the pleading of divine love in our Lord's 
eyes as he offers the Cross. He is not offering it 
as a burden — he himself will bear the burden — 
he is offering it as the means of eternal life. He 
wants you to see in the Cross, not the Cross in its 
heaviness, but him in his loveliness. It is not just, 
" Go, sell " ; the invitation does not end there. It 
is also " Come, take up, follow." Is there any 
great possession that holds you, and enslaves you, 
and sends you away sorrowing ? 

Let us, then, pray, 

To answer our Lord's call to Cross-bearing, 
cheerfully and gladly. Let us pray that the spirit 
of discipline may so enter into our lives that we 
shall find his yoke easy and his burden light. 

O God the Father, who didst not spare thy only 
begotten Son, but didst deliver him up for us all ; 
O God the Son who didst die upon the Cross that 
thou mightest put away sin by the sacrifice of thy- 
self ; O God the Eternal Spirit through whom the 
sacrifice was offered — three Persons and one 
God — we adore the unspeakable greatness of re- 



THE INVITATION TO DISCIPLINE 85 

deeming love. Inasmuch as we are partakers of 
his death we are called upon to take up his Cross 
daily. Lord, enable us to deny ourselves, to 
spend and be spent in thy service. Grant us grace 
to glorify thy name, through Jesus Christ, our 
Lord. 

Ambition is a word that has rather doubtful 
associations, but it is from the associations rather 
than from the thing itself that we shrink. Our 
Lord recognizes that there is such a thing as spir- 
itual ambition when he sets before us as our ideal 
the perfection of God. " Be ye therefore perfect 
as your Father in heaven is perfect." And S. 
Paul tells us to be ambitious of the best 
gifts. 

The desire to make the most of ourselves and of 
our opportunities is only another way of express- 
ing that eagerness with which one presses toward 
the mark of the high calling in Christ Jesus which 
is the characteristic of the saint. 

In a half- formed way such a spiritual ambition 
is not an uncommon thing. There are many who 
dream about sanctity. They read the lives of the 
saints and wonder at their perfectness. They 
even feel impelled at times to seek some of their 
more pleasant experiences. The young are given 
to dreaming of spiritual accomplishment. They 
think that they are intent on reality until reality 



86 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

begins to make demands on them for sacrifice, 
until it develops that the realisation of the dream 
means the abandonment of self. 

It is often difficult to distinguish between 
dreams and desires until we attempt to trans- 
late thought into action. What seems to us to be 
volition, turns out to be mere velleity. There are 
many boys who want to enter Holy Orders but 
few of them ever get so far as a seminary. There 
are many girls who think it would be wonderful 
to be a Religious who never reach the novitiate. 
What happens is that the fascination of this 
world, when it is revealed, dispels the dream. 

There is only one way of finding out whether 
we are dreaming or willing, and that is the impo- 
sition of tests. We rarely impose tests on our- 
selves, but we do not therefore escape them ; God 
so orders life that it is tested at all points. The 
sharp winds of reality sweep away the mists of 
our imaginations. This young man who came 
to our Lord, came in all sincerity, desiring to be 
perfect. But he had not understood what being 
perfect meant, and when our Lord made clear to 
him the demands that perfectness would make 
upon him, it was plain to him that he did not de- 
sire it. He had desired something he thought per- 
fection, but his notion of perfection was illusion, 
not reality. 



THE INVITATION TO DISCIPLINE 87 

The great test of the reality of the religion of 
a Christian is found in his willingness to assume 
the Cross. This is the invitation of our Lord : 
"If any man would come after rne, let him deny 
himself, and take up his Cross daily, and follow 
me." 

There is a good deal of misapprehension about 
the Cross. I fancy that a good many people 
mean by the Cross whatever of the disagreeable 
comes into their lives. If some limitation or suf- 
fering or hardship is ours and we can find no way 
of getting rid of it, we assume a pious look and 
say, " I am trying to bear my Cross." Now I am 
far from saying that the hard things that the 
Providential ordering of life sends us, may not be 
to us the bearing of the Cross ; but I do say that 
they are not such unless we willingly accept them, 
and do not try to make capital out of them as a 
last resource when we find that we cannot get rid 
of them. Nothing can be a Cross in my life that 
I am not willing to have. 

What needs to be emphasised in regard to the 
Cross is just this voluntary character of it. It 
may be a thing accepted, but in our Lord's descrip- 
tion of it, it is a thing assumed. "If any man 
will come after me, let him deny himself, and take 
up his Cross daily." 

We may interpret the Cross as a voluntary Urn- 



88 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

itation of life. That is what it meant in our 
Lord's experience. The Incarnate Life was will- 
ingly assumed by our Lord. He suffered pain 
because he willed the end of his mission and that 
involved pain. He accepted death on the same 
terms. " Therefore doth my Father love me, be- 
cause I lay down my life, that I might take it 
again. No one taketh it from me, but I lay it 
down of myself." Even at the last moment the 
legions of Angels were at hand had he chosen to 
summon them to his aid. But he took the Cross 
willingly and bore it to the end. 

The Cross must mean the same thing essen- 
tially in our experience. If our religion is a real- 
ity, we have found that the successful conduct of 
it limited us in numberless ways. We are called 
constantly to sacrifice other things that we may 
have time or means to devote to our religion. As 
we press deeper into the heart of religion I think 
we find that there are many otherwise harmless 
things that we are impelled to give up because 
they more or less get in the way of the highest 
conceptions of the spiritual life. We find that 
even harmless modes of self-indulgence are things 
to sacrifice rather than things to cling to. The 
steady contemplation of the Cross impels us to 
ever-increasing simplification of life. The nails 



THE INVITATION TO DISCIPLINE 89 

that fasten us to the Cross are nails that we have 
drawn out of other things when we detached our- 
selves from them. 

There is of course nothing especially Christian 
in this process ; it is the ordinary process by which 
all those who desire any end supremely work. 
What is strictly analogous to the Christian Cross 
is assumed by the artist or the scientist or the ex- 
plorer. No one thinks of offering the man sym- 
pathy who cuts himself off from what are called 
the pleasures of life and shuts himself up in a 
laboratory in the pursuit of some chemical discov- 
ery. It is only when one begins to cut himself 
off from the pleasures of life in order the better 
to devote himself to the service of a Crucified 
Master, that one is noticed as doing an unneces- 
sarily hard thing. This attitude of the world 
toward the Cross is not important ; but it is impor- 
tant if we find that the things we have given up 
for Christ's sake and the Gospel's are leading us 
to the attitude either of spiritual pride or of self- 
pity. Cross-bearing should be an utterly natural 
attitude. 

And our acceptance of the Cross of Circum- 
stance should be equally ready. The conditions 
of the Church to-day are very far from ideal. 
" Our unhappy divisions " often produce situa- 
tions which tempt us to impatience and despair. 



90 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Denials of fundamental articles of the Faith, re- 
fusals to administer the Sacraments, gross igno- 
rance and irreverence, are difficult to bear. But 
they call for the patient effort for rectification, 
rather than despair and desertion of the cause of 
Christ in the Anglican Communion. It must be 
that spiritual action and devotion to a Crucified 
Lord will in the end win the triumph of the Cath- 
olic Faith. The Cross which is involved in the 
tolerance of imperfection is one that God is surely 
calling us to assume. Our work in the Church is 
the work of forwarding its perfection. We can 
always make one person more perfect. 

Our Lord bore the Cross for others ; and there 
is a certain cross-bearing that is a part of our duty 
toward the brethren. We are members of a so- 
ciety, and the good of that society comes before 
our own individual taste or comfort. One of the 
problems society is struggling with is that of the 
suppression of the liquor traffic, which from every 
point of view — social, physical, moral, spiritual 
— is of colossal dimensions. Surely, if ever 
there was a question in relation to which the plea 
for individual liberty was futile and selfish, it is 
this question. Surely, if ever there was an ob- 
vious call to assume a personal limitation for the 
sake of others it is this. 

The Cross, even now, is not all pain. There is 



THE INVITATION TO DISCIPLINE 91 

a certain splendor in any sacrifice. That scene of 
S. Francis stripping himself of all that he had in 
order that he might give himself completely to our 
Lord in a life of poverty, is symbolic of much. 
The Christian ideal of poverty is one not to be 
lightly set aside. One cannot but feel that it con- 
tains a call to great simplicity of living. The 
sense of irresponsibility for possession is utterly 
unchristian. Self-indulgence and luxury are not 
at all consistent with the bearing of the Cross. 

The impulse of the primitive Christians to sell 
all and devote all to the Body contains a truth 
which is not to be ignored. We need to remem- 
ber that all that we are and have is our Lord's. 
By voluntary denials we enter into the life of sac- 
rifice and become sharers in his atoning work. 
The Christian, like his Master, does not wholly 
bear the Cross for himself, but embraces others in 
his sacrifice. 

If thou hast squander'd years to grave a gem 
Commission'd by thy absent Lord, and while 

'Tis incomplete, 
Others will bribe thy needy skill to them — 

Dismiss them to the street. 

Shouldst thou at last discover Beauty's grove, 
At last be panting on the fragrant verge, 
But in the track, 



92 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Drunk with divine possession, thou meet love- 
Turn, at her bidding, back. 

When round thy ship in tempest Hell appears, 
And every specter mutters up more dire 

To snatch control 
And loose to madness thy deep-kennell'd Fears 

Then, to the helm, O Soul ! 

Last: if upon the cold green-mantling sea 
Thou cling, alone with Truth, to the last spar, 

Both castaway 
And one must perish — let it not be he 

Whom thou art sworn to obey ! * 

1 Frederick Herbert Trench. 



VII 

THE INVITATION TO REST 
S. Matthew XI, 28 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord: 

Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy- 
laden, and I will give you rest. 

Let us picture to ourselves, 

OUR Lord, at the close of some day's teach- 
ing, gathering about him his chosen dis- 
ciples for an hour of closer communion with them 
than was possible at other times. They must 
have looked forward to such moments of inti- 
macy with eagerness. Then it was that our Lord 
was accustomed to unfold to them so much of the 
deeper meaning of his teaching as they were able 
to bear. Then it was that they were encouraged 
to ask those questions that the Gospels from time 
to time report, and which show how much they 
needed teaching, how little they were as yet able 
to grasp his meaning. Imagine yourself sitting 
in the group of the disciples and listening to our 
Lord. Does it seem a difficult stretch of the 

93 



94 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

imagination? It need not; practically, that is 
what you do when you open your Gospel to make 
a meditation. You are then answering our 
Lord's invitation to come to him and learn of 
him. " Learn of me," he says ; not learn about 
me; but learn from me, from my lips, from my 
words. As you listen to his words you are learn- 
ing as S. John learned, sitting at the Master's 
feet and listening to the word of life. It would 
be in some peasant's house that they would gather ; 
or it may be, in the open, when the light of the 
setting sun still lingered and delayed the night. 
Listen to our Lord taking up some question that 
had arisen during the day and by his questioning 
drawing out the thought that they had not dared 
to express, as on that day at Csesarea Fhilippi he 
asked, " But whom say ye that I am?" Or 
answering some difficulty that had arisen in their 
minds at his teaching, as after the episode of the 
rich young ruler and our Lord's comment thereon 
they asked, " Who then can be saved ? " Or 
again, when after his instruction on divorce, they 
exclaim, " It is good not to marry." We still ask 
our questions, and our Lord is still here to answer. 
The earnest study of all his teaching brings about 
the fulfilment of his promise that his Spirit will 
lead us and guide us, and that we shall be taught 
of him. But it is necessary first to know our 



THE INVITATION TO REST 95 

Lord in the intimacy of our daily intercourse with 
him ; it is necessary to be united with him, to be in 
him, and then we shall know the truth as it is in 
Jesus ; then shall we gain that rest that our Lord 
promises to those who come unto him. 

Consider, first, 

That in this saying of our Lord there is a rev- 
elation of his Deity : Jesus can call us and give us 
rest because he is God. Others can give in their 
own measure; but it is the measure of our com- 
mon humanity. Jesus can give without measure 
because the resources of his Divinity are without 
limit. We can only give what we have — ■ kindly 
counsel, sympathy, love. But we cannot give 
rest; only God can give that. Hence there is a 
deeper note in God's promises than we find else- 
where. " Surely I will go with thee." " I will 
never leave thee nor forsake thee." " Under- 
neath are the everlasting arms." " Come unto 
me all ye that labor." Human helpfulness and 
sympathy avail by throwing us back on ourselves, 
teaching us to draw out neglected or forgotten or 
unsuspected powers, to use our own resources, of 
which we are for the moment unconscious. They 
stimulate and invigorate what is there, they do not 
add anything new. But the Divine sympathy 
adds something to us ; it fills us with the strength 



g6 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

and vigor of the Divine Presence — that Divine 
Presence which is creative of new strength. 
Therefore it is that our Lord does not give us 
maxims, — rules of conduct, — as do the great 
ethical teachers, but he always presents himself. 
He does not say when you are in difficulty, think 
thus and so, or do thus and so; He says, Come 
unto me. And that does not mean merely the 
saying of prayers for help, the calling upon him 
for aid; it means a real coming, a putting of our- 
selves in his hands, the submission of our wills, 
the utter surrender of self. Do you understand 
what it means in the midst of sorrow, distress, 
difficulty, hardness, disaster, to turn from self, 
abandon self, give over your own will, and flee to 
our Lord in eager submission? Any one who 
has knelt at our Lord's feet and said with all ful- 
ness of meaning, " Thy will be done," knows how 
our Lord comes into the life and sets it at rest. 
It is not that we find rest because he has relieved 
us of some trouble, but because he has himself 
come and we have accepted the trouble as his will. 
We have found that the union of our will with his 
will is the revelation of rest. In his will is our 
peace, Dante said long ago. So we learn our les- 
son that restlessness is the result of resistance, 
and that rest and peace are the fruits of submis- 



THE INVITATION TO REST 97 

sion and adoration. To come to Jesus is to come 
away from self. 

Consider, second, 

Self-reliance which from one point of view is 
a quality of strength is, from another, a quality of 
weakness. The self that stands apart from God 
and relies upon merely human power and wis- 
dom has an inner weakness that in time of crisis 
will reveal itself — when we most need strength, 
it will fail us. But the Soul that relies upon our 
Lord with whom it knows itself to be in union 
has unfailing and untiring energy. It draws its 
vigor, not from the broken cisterns of human 
nature, but from the living fountains of the 
Divine. To come unto our Lord in the per- 
manent union of our will with his is to have 
achieved serenity in the face of all troubles. As 
the child is fearless in the arms of its father, so 
are we fearless in our Father's arms before all 
that the world can do unto us. Our trouble is 
that with us coming so often fails to be a per- 
manent state and is but intermittent action. We 
first act on our own impulsive self-will, and then 
flee to God to be delivered from the situations 
that we have ourselves created. The Christian 
Life can be no such intermittent seeking of our 



98 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Lord. His invitation means that we come and 
stay. Rest is not a state that he creates in us 
apart from himself; it is not some momentary 
assuagement of pain; what gives rest is his in- 
dwelling Presence, and to stray from him is to 
stray into restlessness. You have found in those 
hours in which you have fallen victim to the 
spirit of unrest, when you can neither meditate 
nor pray, when the presence of the world has be- 
come so intense that your very faith seemed to 
reel, that the solution of the difficulty was to 
cease from all effort and simply place yourself in 
our Lord's presence and wait for him; to re- 
press the self-activities to the uttermost and open 
your soul to the activities of our Lord. That 
is, you have come unto him when you had let 
yourself be separated, and found your strength 
renewed in the quietness and confidence with 
which you wait for him. You have felt the 
sense of the Divine Presence stealing over you 
and the peace of God filling your soul, till the 
waves of your self-willing died down, as the 
sea's waves sink to gentle ripples after the storm 
is past. 

Let us, then, pray, 

That we may submit our wills utterly to Jesus 
so as to desire nothing apart from him. Pray 



THE INVITATION TO REST 99 

that you may come unto him in all simplicity, 
bringing him whatsoever burden you may have. 

O our God, bestow upon us such rest and peace 
in thee, that thy will may always be dearer to us 
than our own will, and thy pleasure than our own 
pleasure. All that thou givest us is thy free gift 
to us, all that thou takest away is thy grace to us. 
Be thou thanked for all; praised for all; loved 
for all; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

It is good, such is our human weakness, to 
turn from the thought of the Cross to this other 
invitation, the invitation to rest. And yet we 
remember that one grows out of the other. Rest 
belongs to the victors. It comes to those who 
having valiantly borne the Cross and faithfully 
followed up Calvary, have entered into the rest 
that is promised to those who overcome. 

Humanity seems to waver between a religion 
of minimum demands, shaped in accordance with 
a standard of decency of conduct and social pro- 
priety, fit to gain the approval of an easy-going 
god; and a religion of maximum demands, mak- 
ing life very hard in certain directions. The most 
clever adaptation of religion to the tastes of hu- 
manity has succeeded in effecting a compromise. 
It teaches that there is a double standard in re- 
ligion: an easy religion making little demand on 
life for ordinary folk, and a very hard religion 



IOO THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

for those who wish to be saints. There are, it 
would seem, in the Christian religion many hints 
and suggestions, which are not obligations, but 
the following of which results in spiritual en- 
richment of life. It is within this margin of con- 
duct that God does not require, that sanctity 
lies. 

This seems to me profoundly untrue. I do not 
believe that there are two standards of conduct. 
Obligations no doubt differ with differing lives 
and opportunities; but it cannot be that I am at 
liberty to decline what in the way of spiritual 
riches is offered me, on the ground that I do not 
wish to attempt anything so hard. Our Lord 
demands of each of us the taking of the Cross. 
It is through faithful conformity to the life of a 
crucified Master, that we pass into union with 
him. 

These words of our Lord have brought com- 
fort to untold thousands of souls who have taken 
him at his word and come to him. We see in 
imagination the penitents, the mourners of Chris- 
tendom streaming to our Lord and laying upon 
him the burden of their grief, the weariness of 
their sorrows. We, too, have been among them, 
have we not? We have come with our burden 
and have found the rest he promised. We know 
that it is a true word that he has spoken, for we 



THE INVITATION TO REST IOI 

have verified it again and again. There is al- 
ways rest with Jesus. 

But because his words have this wonderful ap- 
plication and promise, and we have found them 
so wonderfully fulfilled in our own experience, 
we must not let this blind us to the fact that the 
call has a far wider application. It is good to 
think of the human sorrow that has been assuaged, 
and the human pain that has been lightened; but 
let us think farther than that. 

I would think of the weariness of a world 
without our Lord. There is so much of it that 
lies still in darkness and has not heard of him, 
or will not listen to the message that comes from 
him ! That means that its labor is fruitless, that 
it has no vital outlook upon the future. The 
history of human thought is a depressing thing. 
It has been attempting through all the centuries 
to account for the world and life without God 
and without Christ. It produces endless systems. 
The proof that they are all unsatisfying is that 
it still goes on producing new ones. It con- 
fesses its failure to reach any conclusion that is 
stable. Human philosophies are no more than 
pleasant intellectual exercises. The sentence is : 
it is labor for that which satisfieth not. 

The failure to gain satisfaction through ma- 
terial things is even more striking. The struggle 



102 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

for the material ends is spiritual impoverish- 
ment. What is more pathetic than the end of the 
successful man of business, the society woman? 
I am not questioning as to their salvation; what 
seems to me so horrible is the spiritual ignorance 
and degradation that so often exists where all 
that the world can minister has been acquired. 
To face God with nothing to offer but the full 
barns as one's sole guarantee of the future is to 
court the sentence, " thou fool." 

Perhaps the most pitiful of all is the struggle 
of social life. To me the tragic thing is not the 
mother watching at the bedside of her young 
daughter, dying of some lingering disease, but 
the mother watching and guiding her young 
daughter who is throwing herself with all the 
power of her opening life into the struggle for 
social success. We can easily call to mind 
scenes — a girl or a married woman, surrounded 
by a group of men, playing all the power of her 
sex to arouse the sting of theirs. It is a porch, let 
us say, of a country house on a Sunday morning. 
The late breakfast is over. The guests fall into 
groups. It is a question of motoring, of tennis, 
of golf. There is the flutter of gay clothes, the 
odor of cigarettes, the flash of eager eyes, the 
prattle of many voices — and through it all the 
appeal of the mass-bell from the church near by. 



THE INVITATION TO REST IO3 

Jesus Christ is being once more lifted, the drama 
of Calvary is being represented. He has once 
more come unto his own and his own receive him 
not. The greater part of the people on the porch 
there, if you were to ask them, would say at once 
that they were Christians, were members of the 
Church, were occasional communicants. That is 
the tragedy. 

Is our Lord a kill-joy, then? Is the accusation 
true that he takes the light and color out of life? 
That his religion is antagonistic to all that is 
bright and beautiful? 

No; yet he does kill some things that are 
reckoned joys. The joys that are aimless ex- 
penditure of human energy, which are waste and 
not construction in life. He claims the un- 
divided allegiance of every life. 

It is only on such conditions that he can give 
much. He cannot produce inner peace and rest 
for the soul by the manipulation of the environ- 
ment of life. He can only produce peace and 
rest by himself possessing the soul and abiding 
therein. The beggar who knocks at our door 
and to whom we give alms out of sheer pity, we 
know is not relieved. Rather he is aided in con- 
tinuing to be the drifting wreck of humanity that 
he is. There are clamorous beggars at God's door 
crying for the charity of a " temporary relief," 



104 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

They fly to him in the hours of darkness for 
succor that they never asked in the days of their 
prosperity. It is not in the power of God to do 
much for such. If we want God, we must come 
to God and be possessed by him. 

We cannot expect rest unless we are willing 
to make the religion we profess the central in- 
terest of our lives. " Come unto me " is the 
preliminary condition. It is strange that there 
should be need to say this; strange that there 
should be need to insist that coming to Christ 
is not a matter of superficial religious observance. 
But when one hesitates to repeat it, there arise 
before him the multitudes of those who at least 
have not learned the truth, however familiar it 
may be to them. So one goes on repeating the 
obvious. 

The demands of religion seem hard only to 
the unconverted, whose wills and affections are 
still set on this world. To such the demands of 
Christianity seem preposterous. But once our 
eyes have been opened to the beauty of divine 
things, the values of life are readjusted. The 
center of thought and desire is elsewhere. That 
one can weigh a social pleasure against a religious 
duty is the revelation of a certain spiritual poverty. 
A person who is really in earnest about religion 
does not feel the pressure. 



THE INVITATION TO REST 105 

What the unconverted person looks on as the 
impossible demands of religion the converted per- 
son does not even consider sacrifices. Such is 
the transforming power of spiritual motive, that 
sacrifice for our Lord becomes joy. 

When we come to our Lord we discover that 
the restlessness of our life was due to the un- 
spiritual elements in it — to its eagerness for 
self-indulgence, its schemes for personal gain, its 
lust for pleasure. Of course our Lord cannot 
give us rest while we retain this world. The 
coming to him means the becoming like him; it 
means the transformation of motive and ideal. 
The old things have passed away in the very fact 
of one's coming. Their place has been taken by 
the new things which are our Lord's revelation of 
himself. We begin to look for a new heaven 
and a new earth, and because we are looking for 
them, we create them. 

Love, friendship, possessions — all these are 
new in Christ. 

The ground of rest is satisfied desire. In the 
life of union all ill desires are avoided, all good 
desires fulfilled. 

Seek no more abroad, say I, 
House and Home, but turn thine Eye 
Inward, and observe thy Breast; 
There alone dwells solid rest. 



106 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

That's a close immured tower 

Which can mock all hostile power, 

To thyself a tenant be, 

And inhabit safe and free. 

Say not that this house is small, 

Girt up in a narrow wall; 

In a cleanly sober mind 

Heav'n itself full room doth find. 

Th' infinite Creator can 

Dwell in it; and may not Man? 

Here content make thy abode 

With thyself and with thy God. 1 

1 Joseph Beaumont. 



VIII 

THE INVITATION TO FAITH 
S. Matthew XIV, 29 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord: 

And he said, Come. And when Peter was 
come down out of the ship, he walked on the 
water to go to Jesus. 

Let us picture, 

PETER getting out of the boat to go to 
1 Jesus. It is toward morning, and our 
Lord, who has been spending the night in prayer, 
is coming to rejoin his disciples. You have been 
on the water some night after a storm. There 
was still a slow, sullen wash of the waves, as 
though they sank back to peace unwillingly. 
Torn clouds were hurrying across the wind- 
swept sky. For moments the clouds were torn 
away from the face of the moon and there was a 
sudden flash of light on the fretful waters. Pic- 
ture the disciples looking over the side of the ship 
and seeing our Lord walking in the moon's path. 
See them shrink and tremble and cry out — " It 
is a spirit ! " And then hear our Lord's voice 
107 



108 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

coming over the water — " It is I : be not 
afraid." How often our Lord has to calm, to 
hearten, to encourage these timid ones ! But 
there is one among them whose nature it is to pass 
from depression to self-confidence. There is a 
certain impulsive boyishness about S. Peter. It 
is difficult to see any reason for the desire to walk 
on the water to our Lord except the excitement 
of it. And the man who had come out of fear to 
self-confidence, swings back again as he feels the 
water move and swell and shift and sink under 
his feet, as, it may be, a cloud was driven over 
the face of the moon, and Jesus was lost to him 
in the darkness. Hear S. Peter's voice issuing 
out of the night: "Lord, save me." "And 
immediately Jesus stretched forth his hands, and 
caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little 
faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? " Let us try 
to see them coming back to the ship, Jesus lead- 
ing Peter — Peter, one fancies, once more de- 
pressed and discouraged by his failure. It was 
an awe-struck band that received them into the 
ship. There was at first an utter silence — a 
silence unbroken even by the voice of the wind 
which had suddenly ceased; and then they came 
and knelt before Jesus " and worshipped him, 
saying, Of a truth thou art the Son of God." 
See S. Peter kneeling at Jesus' feet. 



THE INVITATION TO FAITH IOO, 

Consider, first 

That the quality in which S. Peter was deficient 
was the quality of faith. Faith is self -committal 
to our Lord that is so complete that it forgets self. 
S. Peter's character shows as wanting in that 
steadiness which belongs to an effective faith. 
He is impulsive, unsteady, and fails in crises, not 
meeting the unexpected well. In moments of 
trial he defended himself with the arms of the 
flesh, not the shield of faith. He undertook to 
set our Lord right ; and when our Lord predicted 
his sufferings, " Peter took him, and began to re- 
buke him." At the betrayal he was ready with 
the sword of the flesh when what was needed was 
the sword of the Spirit. Later on he pushed 
himself into a conspicuous place, and then failed 
in courage to confess our Lord. The quality that 
drives him to impulsive action and then fails in 
the crisis, is presumption — faith in self rather 
than faith in God. He is conspicuously lacking 
in the quality of humility which is an indispensa- 
ble element in a true faith. A true faith does 
not break down in the face of difficulty and 
trouble because its confidence is not at all in 
anything that it can do, but in the God in whom 
it is placed. Trust in our own power is trust in 
that which is weak and unstable ; and though we 
may manage to ignore this for the moment, and 



IIO THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

begin as though we were endowed with all the 
strength necessary to carry through our under- 
taking, when the moment of testing comes, the 
sense of our very limited capacity comes over 
us and we droop in disheartenment and failure. 
Yet faith is not faith that God will act for us, 
but that God will act in us and through us. We 
do not substitute God's action for ours, but we 
unite our action with his. Our Lord's reading 
of S. Peter's character is in this sense; and he 
made it clear that he would arrive at spiritual 
strength through his attainment of self-abandon- 
ment. " When thou wast young, thou girdedst 
thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest; but 
when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch out thy 
hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee 
whither thou wouldst not." The change that 
must take place in the character of anyone to at- 
tain to the life of faith is like this : it passes from 
the realisation of the impotence of self-assertion 
and self-reliance to the strength of a life lived 
in God, — it passes from self-abandonment to self- 
realisation in the life of union. 

Consider, second, 

Whether there is a warm and fervent faith at 
the heart of your religion, giving it energy. We 
may know whether we have passed beyond formal 



THE INVITATION TO FAITH III 

religion by the way in which our faith stirs us. 
Is your faith rousing all your powers — your 
reason to seek the truth, your affections to em- 
brace the truth, your will to enact the truth. 
Where there is faith there is a movement of our 
entire nature toward God: for truth is to us no 
abstract knowledge, no set of facts, but God him- 
self, revealing himself. Our faith goes out to a 
Person and rests itself in him; it knits us to 
God himself. When our Lord says to souls that 
have sought his aid, " Thy faith hath made thee 
whole," " thy faith hath saved thee," instead of 
attributing the healing or the forgiveness that has 
taken place to the power of his own creative 
word; what he means is that the surrender of 
self to him which he perceives at the root of their 
action in seeking him, has placed them in a state 
of receptivity, and removed the bar to his action 
which was present when sin and unbelief were 
active. Unbelief, which is the active negation 
of faith, renders his own action impossible. 
" He could do no mighty works there because 
of their unbelief." Faith operates to the release 
of the Divine Energy which is always seeking to 
act in us : it is the throwing open of the shutters 
of the soul that the vivifying sunlight may stream 
in — the sunlight which has all the time been 
shining in the world about us, but could not reach 



112 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

us. In response to our faith there is a real com- 
munication to us of the Divine Power, as the re- 
sult of which we can do that which unaided we 
were unable to do. How can faith, we ask, help 
us to bear suffering, to endure hardness, to sus- 
tain the difficulties of life? In what sense can 
faith solve the intellectual difficulties raised by our 
thinking? Faith is effective in such emergencies 
of life because it unites us to God and makes us 
partakers of the Divine Strength : and because of 
the illuminating power of the Divine Presence 
in our souls, we attain the certainty of God's ex- 
istence and goodness, which makes the questioning 
of the intellect merely the curious discussion of 
the details of a problem of which we already have 
the answer. We are in the position of those who 
have the answer to a problem in algebra, but are 
unable to follow the details of the process by 
which the solution is reached. But having the 
solution we submit, without too much pain, to our 
ignorance of algebraic method. 

Let us, then, pray, 

For the gift of faith: that God will pour into 
our souls such faith in him that we may endure 
unshaken all the trials to which that faith may 
be subjected. Pray for the faith which is utter 
submission to our Lord. 



THE INVITATION TO FAITH II3 

We beseech thee, O Lord, in thy compassion 
increase thy faith in us; because thou wilt not 
deny the aid of thy loving-kindness to those on 
whom thou bestowest a steadfast belief in thee; 
through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

The demand for faith is the preliminary de- 
mand of the spiritual life. " Without faith it is 
impossible to please him: for he that cometh to 
God must believe that he is, and that he is a re- 
warder of them that diligently seek him." 

This is not something exceptional, something 
peculiar to religion, as though in other depart- 
ments of life we had knowledge to go on, but in 
religion had only faith; it is the preliminary de- 
mand of life. We cannot live save by faith. 
" He who will not walk by faith, will not walk 
at all." 

Back of the scientific account of the universe 
lies a great faith — a faith that it is indeed a 
universe and not a multiverse. It is faith in 
the order, the consistency, the intelligibility of the 
course of nature. Without that preliminary as- 
sumption or act of faith, scientific investigation 
would be paralysed. There is nothing that fills 
one with greater awe than the drift of the 
" fixed stars," moving in two streams, we are 
told, in opposite directions. Why? Whence? 
Whither? We do not know but we believe that 



114 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

they belong to a universe that is self -consistent; 
otherwise, we could not think about them at all. 
Faith is at the basis of the order of nature as 
taught by science. 

Faith is at the basis of ordered action. It 
prevents chaos. The man who says that it does 
not make any difference what you believe, so far 
as he can, brings chaos. To say that it makes 
no difference what you believe is to say that it 
makes no difference what you do, for action is 
grounded in belief. The man who is indifferent 
to belief will, if consistent, ultimately become 
indifferent to character. 

But turning to Christian Faith — what calls 
it out? 

Our first faith rests on authority; we are 
taught. Everyone will find an element of au- 
thority in religion as he has received it, no mat- 
ter how far it may have been superseded by 
other elements. It is the business of the Chris- 
tian Church to create this faith by educating 
those who are under its charge. It is to show 
them our Lord and lead them to commit them- 
selves to him. 

Authority is a word that has a bad sound in 
modern ears ; but it is a little difficult to see how 
one is to get away from it. There does not 
seem to be any place in life where we can have 



THE INVITATION TO FAITH 115 

first-hand knowledge of all the subjects that we 
are obliged to deal with. With the increasing 
complexity of life, the expert becomes more and 
more necessary. At the outset of any education 
authority steps in to show us the way. There 
will always be the need of authority where we 
have not acquired first hand knowledge. And 
in matters of revealed religion, therefore, au- 
thority must remain a permanent need. We can 
hardly expect God to repeat his revelation to 
each of us ; it is enough that it has provided for 
it authoritative transmission. 

But the greater part of the religion that is 
authoritatively taught can be later verified in 
experience. It is the business of faith to lead 
us on to experience, just as S. John Baptist led 
his disciples on from belief in his word about 
Christ to personal knowledge of Christ. The 
passage from faith to experience is, indeed, the 
main work of the spiritual life. It takes the ma- 
terial given by authority, and, assimilating it by 
faith, transmutes it into experience. 

I would emphasise this quality of personal 
experience as the end to which faith is leading us. 
Faith is not for itself; it ceases when its work 
is accomplished. Therefore it cannot be mere 
otiose assent to truths that are taught. There 
is a certain driving power in faith that makes 



Il6 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

it accomplish its ends. What is meant by be- 
lieving the Church? Not, surely a lazy assent 
to what the Church teaches, not the substitution 
of the faith of the Church for our own faith, 
leaving ourselves without any obligation! Be- 
lieving the Church is so believing its teaching 
that one is driven to the application of it to life. 

I want to make it very clear that mere assent 
is not true faith. No one can be said to believe 
what the Church teaches about fasting in the 
sense of having faith in that teaching, who never 
fasts. No one has faith in the teaching of the 
Church as to absolution, who does not seek abso- 
lution. 

Ultimately, Christian faith is faith in a person 
to whom one surrenders oneself. Christian 
faith is faith in Christ ; which is not belief that 
Christ lived and set an example and so on, but 
self -surrender to Christ who now lives and makes 
demands on our lives for allegiance. Christ is 
the foundation. I find certain needs in my 
nature which that nature cannot satisfy. Christ 
is here and offers himself and satisfies the need. 

Faith is not an isolated quality. We have to 
isolate when we are describing or discussing, but 
the isolation is in our mind not in the fact. 
Faith cannot exist without the other virtues. 



THE INVITATION TO FAITH 117 

"Now abideth these three; faith, hope and char- 
ity." 

Failure of faith involves doubt of Christ. It 
is usually found to grow out of looking away 
from him. S. Peter thought of himself and of 
the water; if he had thought only of our Lord 
he would not have begun to sink. That is what 
happens to us, is it not? We feel our faith de- 
clining. We say : " I do not seem to have the 
same faith that I had years ago." If we ex- 
amine ourselves we shall usually find that we have 
not the same devotion to our Lord as we had 
years ago. Other things have taken the place 
that he once held in our lives. So we begin to 
sink. God grant that before we sink too deep 
we lift our eyes and cry, "Lord, save us; we 
perish." 

Firmness of faith demands continual vision of 
our Lord. The eye of the soul must be always 
fixed on him. If we permit the vision to become 
clouded by sin, we shall find our desire for our 
Lord growing weak. We shall not want to go 
to him upon the water. We must beware of 
the presumption that exposes faith to influences 
that will cloud or kill it. We may think that our 
faith will bear any amount of strain; but we have 
no right to expose it needlessly. Surely, a 



Il8 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Christian is bound to exercise some care as to 
the books he reads and the company he keeps. 
Not that faith requires ignorance. There is 
great need of instructed faith. People fall a 
prey to unbelief or misbelief, not because there 
is anything conclusive in the claims that are made, 
but because they are unprepared to meet them. 
The romances of the old travellers which told 
that in the Arctic regions certain eggs grew on 
trees which falling into the water broke and re- 
leased wild geese, were accepted because there 
was no way of checking them up. It is so with 
the tales of those who report the wonderful peace 
and unity of the Roman Church. The romance 
of the Papacy has as little foundation in the Bible 
or Church history as the romances of the Ring. 
But you have to know the Bible and Church his- 
tory to be able to say so. 

I have no use for a " cloistered faith." Faith 
must be able to bear the wear and tear of the 
every day life. 

Faith is not founded on miracles or belief in 
them. Miracles are a trial of faith. Faith can- 
not be founded on exceptions in religion any more 
than in nature. Faith is based on the uniformity 
of the divine action, the conviction that God is 
consistent. If he is not consistent, we cannot 
have faith in him. The Bible phrase is : " God 



THE INVITATION TO FAITH HO, 

is faithful." The fact of this consistency is 
demonstrated out of our spiritual experience. 
We find the faithfulness of God in our own life- 
experience, and this not solely in the external 
action of God, so to call it, but in the response 
he makes to spiritual effort. 

The capacity of the life of faith is indefinite. 
If one really believes there can be no limit set 
to what one can do. That is the meaning of our 
Lord's energetic utterances about faith. "If you 
have faith as a grain of mustard seed — " 

" Thy faith," he says again and again, " hath 
healed thee, saved thee." This indicates its 
capacity to identify itself with God. Healing, 
saving, is really the result of the influx of the 
divine in response to the energetic action of faith. 

Faith grows as we rest in it. 

I say to thee, do thou repeat 

To the first man that thou mayst meet 

In lane, highway, or open street — 

That he, and we, and all men, move 

Under a canopy of love, 

As broad as the blue sky above: 

That doubt and trouble, fear and pain 
And anguish, all are shadows vain; 
That death itself shall not remain: 



120 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

That weary deserts we may tread, 
A dreary labyrinth may thread, 
Through dark ways underground be led 

Yet, if we will one Guide obey, 
The dreariest path, the darkest way, 
Shall issue out in heavenly day. 

And we, on divers shores now cast, 
Shall meet, our perilous voyage past, 
All in our Father's house at last. 

And ere thou leave him, say thou this, 
Yet one word more: they only miss 
The winning of that final bliss — 

Who will not count it true that Love, 
Blessing, not cursing, rules above, 
And that in it we live and move. 

And one thing further make him know - 
That to believe these things are so, 
This firm faith never to forego — 

Despite of all that seems at strife 
With blessing, all with curses rife — 
That this is blessing, this is life. 1 

1 Richard Chenevix Trench. 



IX 



THE INVITATION TO DELIVERANCE 
5. John XI, 43 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord: 
Lazarus, come forth. 

Let us picture, 

HAZARUS standing at the opening of the 
tomb, bound hand and foot with grave 
clothes. Imagine the bewilderment of the man, 
called thus from the other side of death — called 
out of what scenes we cannot imagine, called back 
to take up the routine of his old life. We cannot 
think of him as coming back other than regret- 
fully, as one upon whom there was laid a new 
period of service, a new time of probation. He 
stands there on the margin of two worlds, as 
yet hardly knowing to which of them he be- 
longs. In contrast, see the astonishment of the 
sisters as they see the loved brother emerging 
from the tomb which they thought had received 
him forever — an astonishment that passes 

121 



122 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

quickly into joy. What is a great gift of our 
Lord's love to their love, is a great demand upon 
the love of Lazarus. But both the gift and the 
demand are more than personal : it is a great gift 
of our Lord's love to us, it is a demonstration of 
his power over the grave and death. No doubt, 
without this and the other miracles of recall from 
death which he worked we should still believe in 
him utterly, but it is a strong support to our faith 
that he thus manifests the sweep of his power, 
the absolute authority that is his over life and 
death. It was this far-reaching result of his act 
that was in our Lord's mind when he exerted his 
power. " Father, I thank thee that thou hast 
heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me 
always : but because of the people which stand 
by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast 
sent me." Our Lord does nothing impulsively; 
the permanent effects of his action are always in 
his mind — the people that stand by, yes; and 
those who read till the end of time. That crowd 
of hesitant and half -believing Jews, drawn hither 
by curiosity, by some sympathy with the sisters, 
perhaps; they are the representatives of the world 
which from generation to generation was to read 
of this miracle, and learn from it the mastery 
of Incarnate God over the destiny of man. See 
them awe-struck, and for the moment, at any 



THE INVITATION TO DELIVERANCE 1 23 

rate, believing, all their doubts stilled by what 
they see. 

Consider, first, 

That the supreme power of our Lord is mani- 
fested in his triumph over death: here in the 
resurrection of Lazarus, as again in the raising 
of the daughter of Jairus and the son of the 
widow of Nain, but more completely and finally 
in his own resurrection. Death is the last enemy 
before whom all men had trembled and before 
whom most men tremble still. Death still ap- 
pears so hopeless, so final, so disastrous ; it seems 
so to defeat all our aspirations and works! 
Though men's hope in the face of it has proved 
indestructible, they could never meet it without 
a lingering fear. But here is the triumphant 
proof that there is One mightier than death, here 
is the demonstration that death is but an inci- 
dent in our immortality, and from henceforth 
death is swallowed up in victory. If the resur- 
rection of Christ had stood by itself, we might 
have been in doubt as to our own relation to that 
resurrection; but as we stand by the grave of 
Lazarus we have no doubt that our Lord's resur- 
rection involves our own. As in the years to 
come men brooded over the meaning of this tri- 
umphant life — this life of God which had as- 



124 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LOF 

sumed to itself human life, — it became plain that 
our Lord's assumption of humanity was perma- 
nent, and involved, too, the preservation of all 
humanity so far as it was united to him. It 
means that those who live in him, live in him 
forever; that those who die in the Lord are for- 
ever blessed. Men passed beyond the belief in 
the survival of death by the human soul to the 
conviction of a conscious immortality in the 
presence of God. All who mourn become as 
Mary and Martha, awakened from the overpow- 
ering sense of loss to receive back at our Lord's 
hands the life that had seemed to pass from them 
irreparably — only to receive it back, not as 
Mary and Martha to be resurrendered to death, 
but — to receive it back as laid up treasure that 
through the passing years would more and more 
draw their hearts after it. Death to those who 
are in our Lord is not the breaking of bonds, 
but the knitting of new ones that cannot be broken. 

Consider, second, 

That our Lord's summons to Lazarus to come 
forth from the grasp of death is a summons 
to all men to break away from all that implicates 
death, to live in him the free life of the resur- 
rection that he has conquered for them. It is 
not that death will be, but that death is now, 



THE INVITATION TO DELIVERANCE 1 25 

swallowed up in victory. Risen with Christ is 
not a possibility and a distant hope, but a present 
fact. The life that we now live as Christians, is 
the risen life. We are caught up by the power 
of his resurrection to live with him in heavenly 
places. "If ye then be risen with Christ " — the 
if does not imply doubt of the life, but doubt of 
the individual's having laid hold upon it. The 
deliverance wrought in the Christian is a real 
passing from death unto life — a real emergence 
into a new state of being. The power of death, 
and of sin, which death symbolises, is broken for 
all men who will receive the great deliverance, 
and they are endowed with the liberty of God's 
children. We feel from time to time the guilt 
of sin, and, oppressed by its burden, we seek 
pardon and release through a sincere repentance. 
But there is a release, would we only claim it, 
that is greater than that, precious as that is, and 
that is release from the power of sin. It is one 
of the marks of a growing Christian life that the 
power of sin wanes. We find ourselves less and 
less attracted by what it has to offer, less inter- 
ested in its displayed attractions. We wonder 
what it was that we found desirable in its allure- 
ments. We come to smile at temptations which 
it once took all, or more than all the strength of 
our nature to resist. There grows within our 



126 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

souls a sense of power which is the measure of 
our appropriation of the grace of God. The 
voice of our Lord increases in clearness and at- 
tractiveness, and the grave-clothes wherewith we 
were bound unwind and fall away, and we stand 
forth, God's risen ones, feeling the throb of the 
new life in our veins, ready to take up the new 
mission to which we are called. You have ex- 
perienced, have you not, that death unto sin, and 
new birth unto righteousness, that sense of hav- 
ing passed from death unto life, that sense of 
power to meet victoriously the sins that once be- 
set you ? It is no doubt true that this or that sin 
still has power of appeal, or, perhaps, through 
habituation, still has the mastery of your will; 
but that is only the clinging of the old life out 
of which you are passing, — the struggle of the 
old habit that is dying, the lingering in a tomb 
already flooded with the light of your resurrec- 
tion, reverberating with the voice of our Lord's 
summons in the truth of which you as yet dare 
not utterly believe. 

Let us, then, pray, 

For faith in the deliverance that Christ has 
wrought for us. Pray to rise utterly from the 
life of sin to the life of righteousness. Pray for 
grace to shake off the still clinging grave clothes. 



THE INVITATION TO DELIVERANCE 12/ 

O God, who, to show forth the wonders of thy 
Majesty didst, after thy Resurrection from the 
dead ascend into heaven, grant us the aid of thy 
loving-kindness; that according to thy promise 
thou mayest ever dwell with us on earth, and we 
with thee in heaven; where with the Father and 
the Holy Spirit thou art ever one God, world 
without end. 

The Incarnation was a mission of deliverance. 
" Forasmuch then as the children are partakers 
of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took 
part of the same; that through death he might 
bring to nought him that had the power of death, 
that is, the devil; and deliver them who through 
fear of death were all their lifetime subject to 
bondage." " Who hath delivered us from the 
power of darkness, and hath translated us into 
the kingdom of his dear Son." 

This power was manifested and symbolised by 
our Lord's miracles by which he actually delivered 
men from devils, from disease, from death. By 
his teaching he delivered them from ignorance. 

He exerts the same power now through his 
Church. I do not think that the power which 
our Lord gave to his Apostles and which they 
exercised in the healing of disease and other acts 
which we call miraculous, died with them. In- 
deed for some time in the history of the Church 



128 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

" miracles " were of frequent occurrence. They 
ceased when Christians ceased to believe them 
possible. Where men have the requisite faith 
they are still possible. There are many instances 
of healing through Holy Unction wherever that 
Sacrament is administered. 

But it has been, no doubt, the part of wisdom 
not to stress such endowments of the Body as 
the gift of healing, as there would have been 
danger of turning attention away from what is 
the chief function of the Church in working out 
its mission for the deliverance of men. The de- 
liverance which the Gospel promises is the re- 
newal of the world and human society through 
the coming of the spiritual man. Its pains and 
troubles can be alleviated by isolated acts of de- 
liverance, but it can only be set free through its 
entire conformity to the will of our Lord. The 
creation of spiritual humanity is the present work 
of the Church, and the coming of the Kingdom 
of God waits on its success. 

It is no doubt true that the present outlook for 
the coming of the Kingdom is not encouraging. 
That is to say, the end is not in sight. But we 
ought to be encouraged if we are making 
progress. When we remember the immense slow- 
ness with which humanity moves, the ages that 
it takes to acquire any permanent step in ad- 



THE INVITATION TO DELIVERANCE 1 29 

vance, we may be very much encouraged when 
we see that progress is being made in any respect. 
And surely we can see that that is true. The 
power of the Gospel does work in and through 
the Church and outside of the Church. 

Our constant failure is the failure to con- 
tribute our portion to the work of progress. The 
work of progress is the work of the Body of 
Christ, but the Body works through the indi- 
vidual members of it. Our failure to contribute 
our part of the work, means that the work is 
maimed and delayed. Life originates in the 
Head and is transmitted to the members as en- 
ergizing power; but unfortunately any member 
may decline to become the instrument of the 
power, and instead of utilising it, suppress it. 

That is one of the greatest calamities in the 
life of the Church — the suppression of power. 
There are so many members of the Church who 
are mere sponges, taking in all they can, and giv- 
ing out nothing. There is nothing more heart- 
breaking than the fact that by far the greater 
part of the energy of the Church, which should 
be spent on the conversion of the world, is actu- 
ally consumed in the attempt to induce the mem- 
bers of the Church to do their duty as Christians. 

This power of deliverance, which is in fact, 
the presence of Christ in his Church, is able to 



I30 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

overcome even death. The miracle of the raising 
of Lazarus was simply one expression of the 
power of life which is in our Lord. It is the 
same power which brings us into life, which keeps 
us living. It can restore us to life. That, of 
course, is an awkward phrase: Lazarus had not 
ceased to live, nor shall we. The union of soul 
and body which is broken in what we call death, 
will ultimately be reconstituted. Death has lost 
any reality worth considering for those who are 
in Christ. " I am the resurrection and the life; 
he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet 
shall he live; and he that liveth and believeth in 
me shall never die." 

That power of Incarnate Christ is working in 
us all the time. It is the power that enables us 
to overcome the sinful inclinations that we find 
in ourselves. The push of the passions and appe- 
tites is urging us toward sin continually until we 
have overcome by the power of the indwelling 
Christ. We cannot pull sin out by force of the 
will; it is pushed out by the presence of our Lord 
in the soul. 

Temptation is a phenomenon of unstable equi- 
librium. It is possible because the will is not yet 
fixed. We are drawn this way and that because 
we have not yet utterly decided in which way we 
will go. When we completely decide then we at- 



THE INVITATION TO DELIVERANCE I3I 

tain peace, either the peace of God in Christ, or 
the peace of death in the surrender to sin. 

In the meantime the conscience is the index of 
an unstable state. So long as we feel the stress 
of the conscience we may be sure that we have 
not really decided all the questions which life 
asks us. Of course, we never attain entire sta- 
bility in this world. We attain stability in cer- 
tain regions and in regard to certain questions, 
but for most of us, at any rate, there still remain 
questions that are not wholly decided, problems 
of life which are not completely solved. But 
if we have at all succeeded we have done so be- 
cause we have achieved a state of union with our 
Lord. As this state deepens through the sur- 
render of our wills to him, and through the seek- 
ing of his mind as the guide of our life, we find 
the stress of temptation lessens. 

One of our mistakes is to stop short of this 
entire union with Christ. We are often content 
to deal with the guilt of sin, and stop there. 
This comes out in those confessions which month 
after month are practically the same. Life seems 
in such cases an endless round of the repetition 
of the same petty sins. The trouble — or at least 
one trouble — is that we have never got beyond 
estimating sin in terms of guilt, and therefore 
are content with seeking forgiveness. But the 



132 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

offer of our Lord is not simply to free us from 
the guilt of sin, but to free us from its power. 
Until the power of sin over us is broken, little 
is done toward the sanctification of life. 

This deliverance from the power of sin ought 
to mean among other things the deliverance from 
low and unworthy ideals. Some one has pointed 
out that there are a great many Christians who 
are content with a very modest competence in 
the matter of spiritual acquisition. We can in 
no way get on but through the possession of 
ideals of life which spur us to greater activity. 
In other words, we can not get on unless we 
think it immensely worth while to get on. 

It is a sense of the value of the spiritual life 
which sets us to the diligent dealing with those 
minor faults of character which are the dead 
flies that spoil the apothecary's ointment. Until 
we appreciate how completely the growth in holi- 
ness is conditioned by wise dealing, and persistent 
dealing, with very minor matters of conduct, we 
are not likely to be the wise money-changers that 
our Lord desired. 

Our habits are the index as to how the work 
of our Lord in us is succeeding; for our habits 
are only the externalization of the union wrought 
by our Lord through his Spirit. It is the process 
of what S. Paul calls edification; and where we 



THE INVITATION TO DELIVERANCE 1 33 

observe a life which is not acquiring spiritual 
habits we infer that the work of edification is 
not going on successfully. 

The powers of our nature, brought under the 
will of our Lord and the influence of his Spirit, 
become free in the true sense of that much abused 
word, freedom. They are freed for action. 
They have acquired the true liberty of the chil- 
dren of God. What we need is liberty to be the 
child of God, which we cannot be so long as we 
are subject to sin. While we are subject to sin 
our powers are, as it were, mortgaged; it is the 
coming of the Spirit into life that set us free. 

Liberty is freedom from desire. It is what we 
call the life of detachment. We need to con- 
sider, steadily, whether there are not more de- 
sires from which we might be freed. Life tends 
to entangle us more and more in its meshes. 

But at least we should have inner freedom. 

View me, Lord, a work of Thine: 
Shall I then lie drowned in night? 

Might Thy grace in me but shine, 
I should seem made all of light. 

But my soul still surfeits so 

On the poisoned baits of sin, 
That I strange and ugly grow, 

All is dark and foul within. 



134 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Cleanse me, Lord, that I may kneel 
At Thine Altar, pure and white : 

They that once Thy mercies feel, 
Gaze no more on earth's delight. 

Worldly joys, like shadows, fade 
When the heavenly light appears ; 

But the covenants Thou hast made, 
Endless, know nor days nor years. 

In Thy word, Lord, is my trust, 
To Thy mercies fast I fly; 

Though I am but clay and dust, 
Yet Thy grace can lift me high. 1 

1 Thomas Campion. 



X 

THE INVITATION REFUSED 
S. John V, 39, 40 

Let us listen to the zvords of our Lord: 

Ye search the Scriptures ; for in them ye think 
ye have eternal life : and they are they that testify 
of me. And ye will not come to me, that ye 
might have life. 

Let us picture, 

OUR Lord speaking to these unbelieving 
Jews who have been only hardened against 
him by the miracle he has just wrought on the 
impotent man. We feel back of our Lord's 
words the sense of the obstinate opposition that 
met him in his attempt to unveil to men the 
Father. " Rise, take up thy bed, and walk," he 
had said to the sufferer ; and nothing but extreme 
malice could have thought at such a time of ob- 
jecting that it was wrong to heal on the Sabbath 
day. Our Lord's defence was, " My Father 
worketh even until now, and I work." But the 

135 



I36 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

result was that the " Jews sought the more to kill 
him, because he had not only broken the Sabbath, 
but said also that God was his Father, making 
himself equal with God." Try to see our Lord 
talking with these men, trying to bring the nature 
of his mission and his relation to the Father, 
whom they called their God, home to them. 
There are few passages of more wondrous depth 
in all the wonderful Gospel of S. John, than this 
in which our Lord speaks of his sending by the 
Father and his bringing to men of the gift of 
eternal life. We would think that the splendor 
of the teaching would have imposed silence and 
awe on the hearers. After all these centuries one 
finds it impossible to read the report of our 
Lord's words unmoved. He is exposing the very 
heart of his mission, he is speaking words that un- 
close the very depths of the action of God toward 
us. It is as though we had heretofore caught 
glimpses of the meaning of God's action and pur- 
pose through our Lord's words and works, but 
now the full light of revelation streams upon it, 
showing us the marvel of the divine love. 
" Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth 
my word, and believeth on him that sent me, 
hath eternal life, and shall not come into con- 
demnation; but is passed from death unto life." 
But it is all in vain that our Lord bares his heart ; 



THE INVITATION REFUSED 1 37 

they will not listen ; they are so blinded by preju- 
dice that they cannot even understand their own 
Scriptures. " They are they which tell of me. 
And ye will not come to me, that ye might have 
life." Try to see our Lord becoming silent and 
turning away, with a sense of his failure. 

Consider, first, 

That the primal difficulty was that these Jews 
thought that they knew. They were not in the 
usual sense, bad men ; they were men whose minds 
were utterly preoccupied by the conviction that 
their own knowledge of religion was final. They 
were religious men; but they had grasped the 
teaching of their religion partially and one- 
sidedly. They had left themselves no chance for 
religious growth. To them a religion that was 
by its whole teaching temporary and forward- 
looking, had become fixed and backward-look- 
ing. This attitude blinded their eyes to its true 
meaning. They should have been alert to meet 
the fulfilment of the promises of God by the 
fathers ; they should have been awake to the pos- 
sibilities of our Lord; but they were fixed im- 
movably in their prejudices. Therefore our 
Lord's appeal to their own Scriptures was vain. 
They had arrived at an interpretation which ex- 
cluded him. The trivial interpretation of the 



I38 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Sabbath law that they had imposed on the teach- 
ing of the Old Testament, made our Lord a law- 
less person who was not to be listened to. His 
kindliness and readiness to relieve suffering, were 
to them revelations of an irreverent mind. His 
claim to be the immediate representative of God 
was blasphemy. To such minds truth is never 
true on its own merits; it is only true if it fits into 
a preconceived system. Its lack of harmony 
with what they suppose to be truth is its con- 
demnation. Therefore there can be no advance 
in such a religion — it is fixed and dead. Our 
Lord's assertion of power and authority only 
render him the more suspect. It is startling to 
find that our Lord was only successful in his 
preaching when he turned away from good men 
and preached to bad. " This people who knoweth 
not the law are cursed." These were the " com- 
mon people " who heard our Lord " gladly/' 

Consider, second, 

That we probably miss much of what might 
come of our religion through the assumption that 
we already are sufficiently instructed in it. It is, 
no doubt, true that the Christian Religion is 
final in a sense that the Jewish religion was not; 
it is never final in the sense that we have per- 
sonally sufficiently understood it, or made suf- 



THE INVITATION REFUSED 1 39 

ficient application of it. We are in the same sort 
of danger the Jews were in of sinking into a 
state of spiritual immobility, impervious to fur- 
ther appeals. The relations of God to man are 
too complex, the purposes of the divine love for 
us are too rich, to admit of their ever being ex- 
hausted. One fancies that one of the surprises 
of the future will be the revealing of how little 
we have made of our opportunities, how little 
fruit we have reaped of the seed of the Gospel 
sown in our lives. We shall wake after death to 
the realization of how much remains to be done 
before we are in a state to see God. This will 
be one side of our purgation. In the meantime 
it behooves us to consider how far we are mak- 
ing use of the opportunities that we do see, and 
how far, with what energy, we are trying to see 
more. Is it true of us that the Holy Scriptures 
are a dead letter, rather than a source of living 
water out of which we are constantly drawing 
for the refreshment of our souls? Is it true 
that they tell of Christ and his will for us in 
manifold ways that we have not yet appreciated? 
From those pages our Lord calls and beckons to 
us. I doubt if ever anyone meditates through a 
chapter of the New Testament without the sense 
of new discoveries. Old phrases get new mean- 
ings and the familiar is charged with novelty. 



I40 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

The effect of them is that they send us to our 
Lord with a more personal apprehension of him 
as our Saviour and Guide. We discover in him 
deeper sources of spiritual life. We cannot for 
a moment imagine that all the secrets of the spir- 
itual life are known to us, that we sufficiently 
know him " in whom are hid all the treasures of 
wisdom and knowledge." Are you deep stu- 
dents of those hidden treasures? Do the years 
as they pass find you possessed of deeper ex- 
perience of the life that is hid in God with him? 
It is so difficult to master the elements of spiritual 
living, to detach ourselves ever so little from the 
world to live in him, that one cannot but feel 
the urgency of the spiritual problem. One looks 
over the garden where a few plants struggle into 
pale bloom amid a mass of encumbering weeds, 
and sees the picture of one's own spiritual life. 
We feed out of the richness of our lives so much 
that is at best useless and have left over so little 
energy for the fruits of the Spirit. " And ye 
will not come unto me ! " How sad it is ! 

Let us then, pray, 

That we may come to our Lord more fully. 
Pray that his Eternal Life may be manifested in 
us with power. 

O God, the Enlightener and Life of believers, 



THE INVITATION REFUSED I4I 

we beseech thee that thou wouldst endue us with 
the gift of thine Only-begotten Son, and the in- 
effable blessing, and life-giving power of the 
Holy Spirit, that we may love thee without luke- 
warmness, and confess thy faith in love, through 
the same Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

The charge of the Jews against our Lord was 
twofold : I. That he was a breaker of the Law. 
II. That he was a blasphemer. It does not seem 
the function of a meditation to deal with these 
in any detail. Our Lord's defence was the as- 
sertion of his authority as one sent by the Father. 

What concerns our purpose is that our Lord in 
his defence went farther than was at all neces- 
sary for his immediate purpose, and asserted his 
possession of life, eternal life; and that he is the 
immediate source of life to men. 

It is the meaning of the Christian Revelation 
that through our Lord we participate in the divine 
life of God. We need to be very clear that the 
Christian life is not just one more system of con- 
duct. It is the manifestation of a divine life. 
In Christ are " given unto us exceeding great and 
precious promises : that by these ye might be par- 
takers of the divine nature, having escaped the 
corruption that is in the world through lust." 

Our Lord asserts that if the Jews had paid 
proper attention to their own Scriptures they 



142 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

would not have set themselves against him and his 
mission. It is true that God had revealed him- 
self to them, but his revealing purpose did not 
end with that revelation. Privilege should have 
led them to seek further knowledge of God; but 
in fact it had produced in them a pride and self- 
satisfaction that blocked the way to the recog- 
nition of God's work in Christ. The abuse of 
God's gifts had led to spiritual blindness. " Jesus 
said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have 
no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your 
sin remaineth." 

The Revelation of God, had they properly un- 
derstood it, would have sent them to our Lord. 
They would have recognised his Messiahship. 
As they listened to Christ's teaching and saw his 
mighty works, they should have seen in them the 
fulfilment of the prophecies. " They are they 
which testify of me." 

The closed mind blocks all advancement. 
There is nothing so paralysing as self-satisfac- 
tion. When we reach the place where we are 
satisfied with ourselves and our accomplishment, 
then there is no more to be done. But we long 
for the comfort of satisfaction, for the content- 
ment of an undisturbed mind. We dislike to 
have questions thrust on us for solution. The 



THE INVITATION REFUSED 1 43 

average Christian likes to have his religion dealt 
out to him in capsules and to feel that nothing 
more is required of him than to swallow them! 
But contented comfort is always a dangerous 
thing. There is such a thing as a divine discon- 
tent. And it is just as dangerous to be com- 
fortable mentally as it is physically. 

Religion necessarily makes constant intellectual 
demands on one. It is so wonderful a thing, 
this account of our relation to God our Saviour, 
that we cannot hope ever to exhaust it either as 
knowledge or experience. But if we have not 
exhausted it we are bound to strain every nerve 
to assimilate so much of it as we can. The Chris- 
tian life is a steady effort to know God more and 
better. 

Our Lord in this conversation with the Jews is 
speaking of the Old Testament, but what he says 
applies equally to the New Testament. The 
Bible is one means by which God reveals him- 
self. 

The Revelation of God made in our Lord 
and recorded in the Holy Scriptures is inex- 
haustible. Neither the Church nor the individual 
can at any time say : " I understand all." New 
circumstances in the life of the Church or of the 
individual bring out new aspects and applications 



144 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

of truth. Our mental inertia is such that we 
rarely think our way deeply into a truth until 
we have to use it. 

It was when one or another truth about our 
Lord was denied that the Church set itself to 
thinking out connectedly the truths it had received 
about him, and stated them formally in the 
Creeds. It is when to-day some truth is attacked 
that we set ourselves to ascertain just what it 
means. It is when we have to face some new 
temptation that we are at pains to find what the 
mind of the Church is about the sin we are in 
danger of committing. 

We need to feel the importance of a competent 
knowledge of the Bible, especially of the New 
Testament. It is easy to say, I am not a scholar 
and cannot be expected to know about such 
things. Anyone must be expected to know about 
the things which concern his eternal life. We 
have read a good deal about the Scriptures being 
kept from the people during the Middle Ages. 
If the people in the Middle Ages were at all like 
the people of the Twentieth Century no one had 
to work very hard to keep the Scriptures from 
them. 

There are those who have a vague notion that 
something called " criticism " has rendered the 
Bible untrustworthy — that we cannot use it with 



THE INVITATION REFUSED 145 

the same confidence as our fathers did. No 
doubt modern criticism, of the Scriptures has 
done a good deal to change some of our notions 
about them; but I do not know of any certain 
result of criticism which at all weakens my be- 
lief in the Bible as the means of God's revelation 
of himself. On the other hand, criticism has 
done much to make the Bible for me the book 
of a living experience, which opens to me the 
mind of God. 

And as to the New Testament Scriptures : the 
more one studies them, the clearer is the vision 
of our Lord. They have no life in themselves; 
they lead one to our Lord, the source of our life. 
There is a reading of Scripture which has for 
its end the knowing about our Lord. That is 
not enough. We need more than to know about 
him; we need to know him. We need after we 
have read his word to put it into practice. If we 
read, Blessed are the humble and meek, we need 
to become meek, or else we are as the Jews. If 
we read that he promises forgiveness of sins, we 
need to go and seek that forgiveness as he has 
appointed. It was his condemnation of certain 
that they say and do not. Let us not be as they. 
There are all sorts of uses of the Scriptures that 
are legitimate. But speaking from the point of 
view of practical religion any way is an incom- 



I46 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

plete way that does not lead us to a deeper per- 
sonal religion. Our religion must not be like a 
man setting out on a journey and then turning 
back; or, finding a place that satisfies him, and 
settling there. Our life is a journey to God, and 
there is no place to stop short of the unveiled 
Presence of the Beatific Vision. 

One chief function of the Scriptures is to 
stimulate in us desire, as we go on our way; to 
stimulate it by keeping before us the life of our 
Lord as the guide of our lives. 

There is something pathetic in our Lord's 
words : " Ye will not come unto me that ye 
may have life." One of the chief disasters of 
the Protestant Reformation was the minimising 
of our part in the work of Salvation. It is, of 
course, true that salvation is of God and that 
we are not saved by anything that we do; but 
that does not mean that we are wholly passive 
in the work of salvation. God does not save us 
without our cooperation. He cleanses and vivi- 
fies our powers, but, they being so cleansed and 
vivified, he expects us to use them. We are 
to repent, and he accepts our repentance; and 
then we are to bring forth works meet for re- 
pentance. Back of all is his Presence, what we 
call his grace ; but through all is also our response 
to him. 



THE INVITATION REFUSED 147 

So it is in this matter of knowing. There are 
a great many who know about God — and are 
content to stop there. The Christian needs to 
know. To know anyone is to have some personal 
experience of him. It is thus that we know God 
in Christ, through personal experience. The In- 
carnate action of our Lord has made it possible 
for us to be so united to him that we may know 
him. We know him in his action on our lives, in 
his response to our prayers, in his self-imparta- 
tion in the Holy Communion. We experience 
his Presence as we lift our souls to him and speak 
with him. He is a God at hand, we find, and not 
a God afar off. 

If this is not true of us, if we have no sense of 
the divine Presence, if God remains a theory and 
not an experience, we need at once to find what 
there is in our lives that is impeding his self- 
manifestation. It may be indulged sin. It may 
be something we have not called sin — indiffer- 
ence, sloth or the like; whatever it is, let it be 
rooted out. 

No other voice than Thine has ever spoken, 

O Lord, to me — 
No other words but thine the stillness broken 

Of life's lone sea. 
There openeth the spirit's silent chamber 

No other hand — 



I48 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

No other lips can speak the language tender, 

Speech of the Fatherland. 
For others speak to one the eye beholdeth, 

Who veils the soul within — 
Some know not all the joy, and all the sorrow, 

And none know all the sin. 
They speak to one they love, it may be blindly, 

Or hate, as it may be. 
They speak but to the shadow, the illusion; 

Thou speakest, Lord, to me. 
It is unto the sheep the shepherd calleth, 

His voice they know, 
No voice beside can lead them to the pastures 

Where fountains flow. 
No other tells unto my soul the secret, 

The mystery divine — 
The love that maketh glad the inner chambers, 

His home and mine. 
And therefore, O my God, with full assurance, 

I hear, and I rejoice; 
The Heart of Christ, beyond men's thoughts and 
dreamings, 

Told in His voice. 



XI 

THE INVITATION TO FORGIVENESS 
S. Matthew V, 24 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord: 

Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, 
thou rememberest that thy brother hath aught 
against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, 
and go thy way; first be reconciled with thy 
brother, and then come and ofTer thy gift. 

Let us picture, 

ONE standing in indecision before the altar, 
with his gift in his hand ready to offer. 
At the very moment of approach there has risen 
before his mind the image of the injured brother. 
It is as though a curtain had been drawn aside 
and a picture displayed on the field of his memory. 
He sees some incident in his own past — sees 
acts being done, hears words being spoken, and 
realises that he has built up a wall of offense be- 
tween himself and his brother. A temptation 
presents itself to think of the doings or sayings 

149 



150 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

of the brother ; but no, it is not the brother's act 
that is in judgment, it is his own act. The 
brother has something against him — something 
clear, precise, definite, which is the result of his 
own doing or saying. And it takes the gift out 
of his hand, and turns his steps back from the 
altar, and sends him out to seek his brother. 
The thing that he had thought of as not of very- 
much importance, as a mere breaking of harmoni- 
ous relations between himself and the brother for 
a time, reveals itself as a barrier between his soul 
and God. God is not indifferent to our rela- 
tions to one another. Indeed, the basis of our 
brotherhood is in him. Brotherhood is no longer 
a merely human relation: a higher relation has 
come into existence through the Incarnation, be- 
tween those who are born, not of blood, nor of 
the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but 
of God. The brother is now the brother for 
whom Christ died ; the brother who has been bap- 
tized with the one baptism into the one Body, 
and been made, as we, a member of the one Lord. 
The divisions that seem merely human quarrels, 
are rents in the body of Christ. Let us turn back 
to our vision of the altar, and see the one who 
is reconciled to the brother hurrying back to re- 
sume his gift and to offer it with an appeased con- 
science and a joyful heart. 



THE INVITATION TO FORGIVENESS 151 

Consider first, 

How deeply the law of forgiveness is embedded 
in the Gospel. " How often shall my brother 
sin against me and I forgive him," S. Peter asked. 
Seven times seemed to him the conceivable limit ; 
but it was negatived by our Lord's assurance that 
the only limit is the repentance of the brother. 
There is no point at which we can refuse for- 
giveness. But here, in our Lord's sermon on 
the mount the emphasis is changed from the duty 
to forgive, to the duty to seek forgiveness. "If 
thou rememberest that thy brother hath aught 
against thee." It points to a spiritual state which 
has been created that is displeasing to God. And 
it points to this : that we cannot excuse our spir- 
itual state by the spritual state of the brother; 
we are bound to set ourselves right in the sight 
of God. We are bound to remove all bars of 
our own erecting. And the impulse to do this is 
to be sought in the action of God. God is not 
simply ready to forgive if we ask him; but he 
seeks to forgive. He presses about us with his 
grace and favor, so that it is only through ob- 
stinate resistance that we can escape forgiveness. 
He does not wait for any movement on our 
part; he comes and offers himself. While we 
were yet sinners, Christ died for us. God's at- 



152 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

titude is not that of passive waiting for us to 
come to him; he urges himself upon us. He 
sacrifices himself to his own love; he goes up 
on a Cross that he may attract us. Try to realise 
the divine hopefulness that is displayed in the 
Cross. "And I, if I be lifted up will draw all 
men unto me." Try to see the world as a world 
of ignorant, sinful, indifferent souls about which 
the divine pity is surging, seeking for entrance 
and acceptance. Try to understand the thirst of 
God which can only be satisfied by the oppor- 
tunity to forgive sins. And see this action of 
God participated in by saints and angels who 
associate themselves with his work, and by their 
prayers and labors seek to forward it. Try to 
understand the deep meaning of that saying: 
" There is joy in the presence of the angels of 
God over one sinner that repenteth." Picture to 
yourself the joy that runs through heaven when- 
ever there is made a first confession. Have you 
ever so filled heaven with joy? 

Consider, second, 

In contrast with all this, the meagerness and 
grudgingness of our forgiveness. We hardly 
forgive, if one comes and seeks us ; we have great 
difficulty in seeking forgiveness for ourselves. 
We say with immense difficulty, " I was wrong." 



THE INVITATION TO FORGIVENESS 1 53 

We have strange sayings about " I can forgive, 
but I cannot forget." But God says, Thy sins 
and iniquities I will remember no more. God 
forbids us to call up before him in any doubt the 
sins we have confessed and been forgiven. God 
even forgives the sins we forget, if so be we 
show a good will. God in his mercy has estab- 
lished the means of forgiveness; and yet we find 
it so difficult to make our confessions! And is 
not this true: That the Brother whom we re- 
member to have offended as we prepare to draw 
near to the altar, is most often our Elder Brother? 
And what can it mean to go and be reconciled to 
him, but to seek his forgiveness in the very way 
that he has provided for the remission of sin — 
to seek the cleansing of our souls in the applica- 
tion of the Most Precious Blood in the Sacra- 
ment of Penance? Consider your own state 
toward our Lord. Have there not been manifold 
offences for which you ought to seek reconcilia- 
tion from him? Is it generous, is it loving, is 
it grateful, not to come to the sacrament that 
he has provided ? The Brother who died that you 
might be forgiven — does he not deserve better 
at your hands ? Let us put aside for the moment 
any other aspect of sin than its ingratitude. It 
is an act of ingratitude toward the Lord who 
died. How then ought you to act ? The brother 



154 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

seeks reconciliation for the sin that you com- 
mitted ! That, surely, is a wondrous thing. 

Let us, then, pray, 

That we may deeply realise our own need of 
forgiveness, and through that learn readiness to 
forgive. Let us pray that all traces of resentment 
against wrong may be banished from our minds. 

O Lord, we beseech thee, absolve thy people 
from their offences; that through thy bountiful 
goodness we may all be delivered from the bands 
of those sins, which by our frailty we have com- 
mitted. Grant this, O Heavenly Father, for Jesus 
Christ's sake, our Blessed Lord and Saviour. 

We recognise our own sinfulness and seek the 
pardon of God. There is no one who would deny 
that he is a sinner. There are, to be sure, people 
who think that they are not very bad, as they 
say; there are even people who do not like to 
say in the general confession that they are " mis- 
erable sinners " ; but even such would hardly deny 
the existence of some sin, or claim perfection. 
We are all sinners. 

There is a like universality in God's offers to 
pardon. Pardon is for all ; all, that is, who want 
it. God requires of us unlimited willingness to 
forgive. Our Lord's words to S. Peter are the 
expression of that. But the unlimited forgive- 



THE INVITATION TO FORGIVENESS 1 55 

ness that he expects us to exercise toward those 
who have offended us, is the forgiveness he is 
ready to exercise toward those who offend him. 

We, of course, can decline forgiveness. We 
can ignore God's pleading with us to be reconciled 
to him. We can block forgiveness by spiritual 
unfitness. But it remains that God willeth not 
the death of a sinner, but rather that he should 
turn from his sin and be saved. 

The importance of this is shown by the way in 
which it is stressed by our Lord — he returns 
to the subject again and again. 

It is in the Lord's Prayer : " Forgive us our 
trespasses as we forgive those who trespass 
against us." Imagine yourself saying this prayer 
while you are unforgiving! 

It is brought out in the parable of the Unfor- 
giving Debtor. Imagine yourself seeking the 
forgiveness of God and then going forth and tak- 
ing your brother by the throat and saying : " Pay 
me that thou owest! " 

It comes out in these words of the Sermon on 
the Mount: "If thou rememberest that thy 
brother hath aught against thee." If we have 
anything against the brother, it is enough that 
we be ready to forgive when he wants forgive- 
ness; but if he has aught against us, we must 
seek forgiveness. 



156 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

There is an obligation to do our uttermost to 
live in love and charity with all men. That means 
an active attempt on our part. It is not just 
trying to avoid trouble, but an attempt to be peace- 
makers. " If it be possible, as much as in you 
lieth, live peaceably with all men." 

There is no more common form of sinfulness 
than sins against charity. The uncharitable 
spirit, which is always sitting in judgment on 
others. Examine yourself as to whether you are 
wont to attribute motives to people ; whether you 
are afflicted with that most vile form of conceit 
that thinks it can read people's faces and know 
what they are thinking. Are you touchy, over- 
sensitive, critical, envious? 

We feel an injury easily when it is done to us; 
but the sense of wrong is difficult to discern when 
it is our wrong, when we are the offenders. We 
find it hard to acknowledge a wrong; that is apt 
to be a defect in our penitence. We may test 
our sincerity easily by noticing whether we are 
willing to make whatever restitution is called for 
by the circumstances. We may think that we 
are penitent because we are willing to acknowledge 
our sin to God; but an injury to another may call 
for restitution. Perhaps there is a thought here 
for those who " make their confessions to God," 
and do not care to make them to a priest. 



THE INVITATION TO FORGIVENESS 1 57 

One of the commonest forms of offence against 
the brother is gossip. It is terrible to think how 
great a proportion of ordinary conversation is 
personal. Is this because the average mortal has 
so little conversational resource that he has to talk 
about persons? Is it because we read so little, 
and think so little, that we are left without any 
subjects except personal ones? Surely, in that 
case it would be better to keep silent. If you 
keep silent, people may think you uninteresting; 
but that is better than showing yourself mali- 
cious or envious. 

We need especially to beware of that form of 
maliciousness which repeats the words of another 
with a change of emphasis or intonation which 
entirely alters their meaning. 

The obligation to forgiveness is absolute. But 
we must not confuse forgiveness with emotional 
attitude. It is possible to forgive, in the case of 
a grave injury, some time before one can master 
one's emotions. If some one I have loved and 
trusted inflicts a severe injury upon me, there 
may be the entire readiness to forgive ; but it may 
not be possible at once to think of the person with 
calm, or to wish to meet him. But it is the readi- 
ness to forgive that matters. 

It is not uncharitable to prosecute a criminal 
who has injured us. We have not only ourselves 



I58 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

to think of; we are members of a society, and 
the interests of society may demand that we 
prosecute a case where our own impulse would 
lead us to let it go. To condone a crime is not 
an act of charity, but may involve a grave in- 
jury to our neighbors by its encouragement of 
ill-doing. 

But one would not prosecute to satisfy spite or 
revenge. There must be a social injury to justify 
prosecution. One would not prosecute a child 
for injury of property in ordinary circumstances, 
or a servant found in petty stealing. 

On the other side, the existence of a charitable 
spirit is evidenced by willingness to be practically 
helpful. To aid and succor in case of poverty 
or illness, to pray constantly for those who have 
injured, are obligations. Pray also for a for- 
giving spirit. 

Another thing about which care should be 
taken is to watch against going about telling of 
the wrong that I think that I have suffered. 
When you examine your conscience as to whether 
you have forgiven one who has injured you, ask: 
Have I told anyone about this? So long as we 
enjoy telling of our injuries we may be certain 
that we have not forgiven them. 

Remember, that our forgiveness is conditioned 
on our forgivingness. It is interesting to hear a 



THE INVITATION TO FORGIVENESS 159 

man who would not forgive a debt of five dollars, 
or his neighbor for some very minor injury, de- 
claiming about the universal forgiveness of God. 
He cannot imagine that there should be such a 
state as hell ; God would certainly forgive, and so 
on. 

But having complied with the conditions, we are 
always certain of the pardon of God. " In fact, 
God, since he is a fountain of mercy, is unable 
not to succor, is unable not to forgive him who 
calls upon him humbly and with confidence, even 
if he had committed all the sins of the world a 
thousand times over." (Blosius.) 

Our Lord looking out upon the world from 
the vantage point of the Cross found that the 
rage against him was due to ignorance. He saw 
that it was not himself that needed pity, but 
those his murderers. It is a point of view that 
it becomes us to take. Instead of merely de- 
nouncing evil and wrong — done whether against 
ourselves or others, try to understand it. There 
is probably not very much malicious hatred of 
good in the sins which are so prevalent in society 
to-day; rather they spring out of passions which 
their victims have never been taught to discipline. 

There is not much in modern life to teach a 
child self-control; the circumstances of our edu- 
cation lead to the practice, if not the theory, of 



l60 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

individual anarchism. Those who are trained 
to the assertion of right, rather than the perform- 
ance of duties, care little enough for the rights 
of others, and are likely to over-ride them rough 
shod. 

On the other hand, our own practice of the 
Christian life, our imitation of our Lord, our 
spiritual watchfulness lest we injure the brother, 
should make us extremely careful in all social 
relations lest we offend through selfishness or 
disregard of the rights of others. 

To be forgiving, as it carries with it the sense 
of being forgiven, is the way of peace. It en- 
sures that interior calm which is so great a boon. 
Especially is it true that as we grow old, we find 
the value of a charitable temper. There is no 
better evidence of our Lord's life in us, than the 
universal love that we feel toward all about us. 
As we grow old we either grow charitable or we 
grow ill-tempered; and an ill-tempered old age 
is a very horrible thing. 

Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun. 

Which was my sin, though it were done before? 
Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run 
And do run still, though still I do deplore? 
V/hen Thou hast done, Thou hast not done; 
For I have more. 



THE INVITATION TO FORGIVENESS l6l 

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have wonne 

Others to sin, and made my sins their door? 
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun 
A year or two, but wallow'd in a score ? 

When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done; 
For I have more. 

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun 

My last thread, I shall perish on the shore ; 
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son 
Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore ; 
And, having done that, Thou hast done; 
I fear no more. 1 

^•John Donne. 



XII 

THE INVITATION TO SELF- 
KNOWLEDGE 
5. John IV, 16 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord: 

Jesus saith unto her, Go, call thy husband, and 
come hither. 

Let us picture, 

OUR LORD, sitting tired by the well in 
Sychar. There must have been many 
hours when our Lord was utterly weary with 
the work he had given himself to. But one who 
has others depending on him, others who must 
be guided, especially if they are weak and ready 
to be despondent, cannot ordinarily permit him- 
self to show his weariness. But now with the 
disciples sent in to the city to get food our Lord 
sits weary. But however tired he may be, he 
is rarely permitted to rest. To him by the well 
comes the woman of Samaria with her pitcher 
for water. How often it happens that we ap- 
proach some momentous crisis in our lives with- 

162 



THE INVITATION TO SELF-KNOWLEDGE 1 63 

out at all suspecting that the day we are facing 
will be anything but an ordinary day, as com- 
monplace as the days that have preceded it! 
So this woman took her pitcher and went out 
to the well as on other days, and drew near to 
our Lord as to any chance traveller. But it was 
the most momentous day in her life. See our 
Lord watching her as she comes along the path, 
and recognising in her a soul in sin that needs 
his help. One imagines that the look of weari- 
ness passed from his face, that he became alert 
and ready to meet the woman, opening the con- 
versation naturally with a request for a drink of 
water. There is always infinite tact in our Lord's 
individual dealing with souls — just the right 
word to lead on to the end to which he is aim- 
ing. So it is in this case; before she suspects 
it the woman's life is bare in our Lord's hands. 
Watch her when she realises that her life is re- 
vealed to one in whom she cannot but perceive 
some mysterious moral and spiritual authority; 
see her struggle to change the subject, to shift 
the conversation to familiar controversial ground 
as to the relative merits of Jerusalem and Mt. 
Gerizim. But our Lord will not permit it; he 
brushes the local question aside with the assertion 
of the broad principle of spiritual worship, and 
goes on to the announcement of his own Mes- 



164 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

siahship. Try to see the woman looking at our 
Lord in perplexity, and then — how natural the 
touch is ! — leaving her waterpot and going her 
way into the city with her tale of the Stranger 
who told her all the things that ever she did. 

Consider, first, 

That this woman's ignorance of her true state 
was typical. It is constantly true of us that we 
know not what we do. No doubt in some vague 
degree this woman was conscious that her conduct 
was not altogether right ; but probably it did not 
call out much criticism from her neighbors or 
friends; she was not conscious of any great 
amount of pressure from public opinion; she was 
doing as others did. It happens that if we are 
not criticised from without, if we are not brought 
to the bar of any decided public opinion, we easily 
acquiesce in the prompting of desire. One 
fancies that the woman of Samaria was simply 
an example of moral drift — we all display the 
phenomena of that more or less. There are many 
points on which we have little or no moral con- 
viction, where we display in our conduct a moral 
opportunism. Lack of moral decision is very 
widespread. We do not notice it because most 
men keep fairly well within the limits of con- 
temporary convention, and therefore do not at- 



THE INVITATION TO SELF-KNOWLEDGE 1 65 

tract notice to themselves. It does not appear 
from the story that the Samaritan woman was 
very much impressed with her fault; she does 
try to avoid discussion of it, but she wonders 
more at the fact of our Lord's knowing than at 
what he knows. This is not at all surprising 
when we remember the half -heathen surroundings 
of her life. There was not very much moral 
energy in the race before the coming of our Lord, 
and since then the assimilation of the Gospel as 
moral energy has been very slow. We are still 
living in a state of society which sees constantly 
women living with those who are not their hus- 
bands, and there is no very effective protest even 
from those who are themselves living right on 
Christian principles. Men and women who are 
living in adultery are ever received by Christians, 
and to do otherwise exposes one to the charge of 
narrowness and gross uncharity. 

Consider, second, 

That ignorance is not just an accident and a 
trifling matter. We are morally responsible be- 
fore God, not only for the things that we know, 
but for the things that we ought to have known 
and might have known. There is such a thing as 
involuntary ignorance; but usually our pleading 
that we are ignorant is a confession that we know 



1 66 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

our ignorance and have not really tried to cor- 
rect it. We cannot be excused from the obliga- 
tions of life, because we have been too indifferent 
or too inert to fulfil them, or ever to ascertain 
what they are. Are you sure that you know the 
duties and obligations pertaining to your state of 
life? Or are you just living morally from hand 
to mouth on the conventions of the social circle 
to which you belong? That is a very dangerous 
method of life. You may wake at the particular 
judgment to the consciousness that you have never 
even tried to find what the will of God is for you, 
much less sought to follow it. That means, of 
course, that you are a moral destitute, one of 
the people whom our Lord pictures as building 
their houses on the sand to have them swept away 
at the first storm that arises : those whose sur- 
prised protest at the Day of the Lord will be, 
" When saw we thee anhungered or naked or in 
prison?" For the commonest of all ignorance 
is the ignorance of self; we may know many 
things, — we may have mastered many branches 
of human knowledge, and still be ignorant of the 
thoughts of our own hearts. The springs of life 
lie deep, and few there are that find them. 

Let us, then, pray, 

For enlightment; pray, that God may lead 



THE INVITATION TO SELF-KNOWLEDGE 1 67 

us from the darkness of ignorance to the light 
of the knowledge of him. 

Almighty God, the Fountain of all wisdom, 
who knowest our necessities before we ask, and 
our ignorance in asking ; we beseech Thee to have 
compassion on our infirmities; and those things 
which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for 
our blindness we cannot ask, vouchsafe to give 
us for the worthiness of thy Son, Jesus Christ, 
our Lord. 

Our relation to our Lord is a revelation of our- 
selves to ourselves. We understand ourselves, 
as we see ourselves in him. It is the fallacy of 
the young who wish to " know life " that we un- 
derstand sin by studying sin. We learn by ex- 
perience, the saying goes; which is true; but the 
trouble is that the experience we so gain comes 
too late to be of much use. If life is to be 
guided, we need knowledge before experience; 
and therefore the experience that will profit us 
is the experience of others. We might learn by 
the experience of others, but we rarely do. 

We do not really learn to understand sin by 
studying sin ; we learn to understand sin by study- 
ing God. So we understand holiness, not by 
studying it in man, but by studying the holiness of 
God. Self-knowledge comes to us from Christ. 
We find in him the ideal of perfection, and it is 



1 68 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

from the study of that that we learn what it is 
his will that we should be. 

Both the ignorance and the optimism of the 
average man about himself come from the fact 
that he adopts a merely human standard of life 
and remains content with that. We are con- 
tent to be as good as other people — which is not 
at all the vocation of the Christian life. " Be 
ye therefore perfect, as your Father in heaven 
is perfect," is the standard set before us. We 
find it very easy to decline that standard and to 
content ourselves with one less perfect on the 
ground that perfection is too much to be ex- 
pected from one in our state of life or with our 
limited powers and opportunities. It is enough 
for us if we attain to the standard of limited 
respectability we see satisfying our social circles. 
Why should we expect to be better than others? 

We have, moreover, a truly wonderful power 
of self-deception. We are able to imagine that 
we are what we would like to be. It is marvel- 
lous — this power of ignoring facts. It comes 
out in people's self-examination. The average 
man rarely seems able to get below the surface, 
and fathom the true motives which are inspiring 
his life. He contents himself with the most 
trivial scanning of the surface of life, resulting 
in the discovery of just the sins that he habitu- 



THE INVITATION TO SELF-KNOWLEDGE 1 69 

ally commits, and which therefore he expects to 
find; but there is little deep probing of the inner 
life. 

At times our self-esteem gets a shock. We ex- 
perience some fall; we are so brought face to 
face with failure that we cannot escape the knowl- 
edge of it. We are revealed to ourselves. That 
is a very humiliating moment. Perhaps for an 
hour we realise the meaning of words we have 
so often used : we are miserable sinners. But 
we have a wonderful faculty of self -recovery. 
We begin to explain ourselves to ourselves. We 
failed, to be sure, but there were special reasons 
in this case. Under the special circumstances, 
we could hardly have been expected to stand. 
In fact, while the surface showing is against us, 
if we take all the circumstances into account, we 
can hardly be said to have failed at all. So we 
speedily get back our self-esteem. 

Why is this? 

There is a certain kind of unreality cultivated 
by the conditions of our social life. We find 
very little straightforward honesty there. Every- 
thing is governed by conventions, which are ac- 
cepted and not questioned. 

Follow an individual life; the life of any child. 
At the start the mother impresses an ideal, and 
tries to make the child conform to it. This ideal 



I70 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

is not usually a Christian ideal, but the social ideal 
of the time and circumstance. It has therefore 
no deep basis, nor impressive authority. Gradu- 
ally the child comes to form an ideal of his own, 
growing out of his own time and circumstance, 
and differing from that which he has been taught. 
There are more and more thoughts and actions 
in which the mother has no part. These are sup- 
pressed in that relation. Therefore the surface 
of the life becomes insincere. There is an un- 
derground life which assumes immense impor- 
tance. 

But for the present, the importance is in the 
artificiality of the self -presentment. There come 
to be several parts played by the boy. 1. 
Mother's boy, tending more and more to insin- 
cerity. 2. The boy whom his companions know. 
3. (Possibly) the boy whom his confessor 
knows. This boy, unless great care is taken, will 
become a mere stage property. 4. The boy as 
he knows himself. This boy in most cases is a 
convention. There is no true self-knowledge. 

So it is throughout life. We play a number of 
parts. 1. The person in the family. 2. The 
person whom the public knows. 3. The person 
revealed to intimates. 4. The person as he ap- 
pears to himself. 5. The person whom God 
knows. 



THE INVITATION TO SELF-KNOWLEDGE 171 

There is constant danger of acquiescence in 
some partial view of one's life. There is a spe- 
cial danger of taking self at one's friends' esti- 
mate. It requires a well balanced judgment to 
reject the suggestion of one's own greatness or 
importance. 

The effect of self-expression in the terms of 
one's ideal is that one is always expressing oneself 
in advance of attainment. A public teacher has 
to do this; he cannot express in terms of achieve- 
ment, but must do so in terms of ideal. He will 
often have the appearance of claiming more than 
he has mastered. But there is no way of avoid- 
ing this. 

There is nothing one would so much care to 
avoid as a smug self-satisfaction, a certain sleek 
contentment with self. 

A good remedy for this is a saving sense of 
humour. If one is likely to take oneself too seri- 
ously a humorous side-glance at one's accom- 
plishment in comparison with what one ought to 
have done will probably cure an over-estimate of 
self-importance. 

We need to have our ideals very clear. They 
should afford an objective standard of effort 
which keeps us always on the alert and striving. 
The constant study of the Christ-ideal will give 
us a deepening conviction of what is of obligation 



172 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

for us, and prevent us from facile acquiescence in 
present attainment. 

Life must be constantly subjected to severe 
self-examination. There is a danger to people of 
a certain type of piety, of dwelling too much on 
the details of the devotional life, and too little on 
the homely detail of daily duty. There are those 
who seem to see only one side of life. They are 
apt to neglect the total impression that they are 
producing, in the family, for example. It is pos- 
sible to be punctilious in the performance of re- 
ligious routine, and at the same time to be exact- 
ing, and difficult to live with. 

Of a passing acquaintance, someone asked 
Whitefield, " Is he a Christian?" "I do not 
know," was the answer; " I have never seen him 
in his home." 

There is also the danger of excusing the decline 
of ideal by change of circumstances. It is chari- 
table to take account of circumstances in judging 
others, but it is dangerous to excuse our own 
laxity on that ground. Our business is to domi- 
nate circumstances and not be dominated by them. 
Our Lord deals with this side of life in the Par- 
able of the Excuses. 

The grounds on which we excuse ourselves 
from the following of high ideals indicate that 
what we want is to be relieved from the pressure 



THE INVITATION TO SELF-KNOWLEDGE 1 73 

of them. There are times of spiritual weariness 
when the pressure of the ideal is almost too much 
for us. But what we need is not less or a lower 
ideal, but spiritual refreshment. To yield to the 
sense of pressure would simply produce an un- 
easy conscience. 

We can only build a life that is spiritually 
strong on the basis of dealing in absolute sincerity 
with ourselves and God. Remember the lawyer 
who came to our Lord, of whom it is said : 
" And he, willing to justify himself." That im- 
plies the sort of quibble which is evidence of in- 
sincerity. 

We become discouraged by failure. But failure 
is not necessarily discouraging. It is always il- 
luminative. When we have discovered the 
ground of our failure, we are on the way to cor- 
rect it. 

The ideals being there; and the self honestly 
estimated, work away from self to God. Do 
not look backward; look upward. Trust in the 
power and the love of God. 

To learn, and yet to learn, whilst life goes by, 

So pass the student days; 
And thus be great, and do great things, and die, 

And lie embalmed with praise. 



174 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

My work is but to lose and to forget, 
Thus small, despised to be ; 

All to unlearn — this task before me set; 
Unlearn all else but Thee. 1 

1 Gerhardt Ter Steegen. 



XIII 

THE CALL OF URGENCY 
S. Luke XIV, 17 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord: 
Come : for all things are now ready. 

Let us picture, 

OUR LORD preaching to a crowd which has 
gathered in some Galilean village street. 
Our Lord's fame has become so wide-spread in 
this region that the first report that he is coming 
sends people running to him. We can see them 
dropping their work and hurrying out into the 
street as the word is passed, " Jesus of Nazareth 
is coming." In many the report would just stir 
curiosity; they had heard from friends, from 
passing travellers, of strange things said and 
wonderful works done by our Lord, and they 
would be eager to see and hear for themselves. 
The rumour that the authorities at Jerusalem did 
not at all approve of Jesus and his teaching would 
add a certain flavor to the gratification of their 

i75 



I76 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

curiosity. But to others the news of his near- 
ness would come as a gleam of hope in the dark- 
ness. Some paralytic who had long lain help- 
less had become familiar with the name of Jesus; 
the neighbors who came in from time to time 
had been saying, "If only Jesus of Nazareth 
would come this way he might heal our friend 
here as he has healed so many others.'' A blind 
man who has heard the story of how our Lord 
opened the eyes of the blind has been nursing the 
secret hope that some day the wonderful Master 
would come this way. So we see blind and lame 
folk hurrying along; sick folk borne on beds; 
mothers bringing their children ; until when Jesus 
comes into the street a crowd at once besets him. 
His first work would be with the sick — there 
would be no possibility of quiet speaking till all 
these clamors for help were stilled. And then 
would come the instruction : a vivid story, illus- 
trating some point of spiritual teaching; a parable 
which would arouse wonder as to what he meant. 
We can fancy that long afterward the village- 
folk when they met, would tell over the par- 
able and dispute as to what Jesus meant them to 
understand. I fancy that there was something 
about his personality which held the crowd quiet 
and attentive even when their ignorance or hard- 
ness of heart left them uncomprehending of his 



THE CALL OF URGENCY \JJ 

meaning. Try to see the crowd about Jesus as 
he gives the invitation, " Come, for all things are 
now ready." 

Consider, first, 

The constant theme of our Lord's preaching 
was the coming of the Kingdom - — " the Kingdom 
of Heaven is at hand." As we see him standing 
in the street with the sick and impotent folk all 
about him awaiting the healing touch of his hand, 
it is easy to make the blunder that the central 
fact of his mission was the dealing with the 
physical ills of human life. We might — many 
do — see in him the great Philanthropist. But 
all this work of healing was quite secondary 
in our Lord's mission. That mission centered 
in the thought of the coming Kingdom. Men 
must be made ready for that. The disciples who 
are attracted to him must be winnowed out and 
certain chosen with a view to the future work. 
What governed their selection, we infer, was 
their teachableness — their capacity to assimilate 
the mind of our Lord, and be prepared to carry 
on his work. This is one reason, we think, why 
he wanted very simple men. A College of 
Apostles, like any other college, would have been 
full of theory-spinners, anxious to apply cer- 
tain original views to the meaning of our Lord's 



178 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

work — the world has been full of them ever 
since. But our Lord wanted simple, teachable 
men, who would deliver the message as they re- 
ceived it. Consequently, because of their fidelity, 
the first Christians understood the central mes- 
sage of the Kingdom. They did not construe 
our Lord as a healer, a moralist, a philanthropist ; 
they accepted him as a King into whose Kingdom 
they had been brought, as the Head of a Body 
of which they had been made members. Always 
in their thought Christ is supreme and they gladly 
subscribe themselves his subjects — " Slaves of 
God and of the Lord Jesus Christ." They have 
no sense of thinking out a religion or forming a 
Church. Religion, Church, Christ, — these they 
have been brought to and gladly accept. We 
follow the first Missionaries on their journeys up 
and down the Roman Empire, and find the central 
message everywhere the same — - the Crucified 
Jesus, risen and exalted by the power of God to 
be a Saviour and a King. " Him hath God ex- 
alted with his right hand to be a Prince and a 
Saviour." 

Consider, second, 

Has the Kingdom come to you? You have 
been praying a long time, " Thy Kingdom come." 
Has your prayer been answered in your own life? 



THE CALL OF URGENCY 1 79 

The coming of the Kingdom is a progressive 
fact. It has been coming since our Lord an- 
nounced it ; it will one day come to its full mastery 
of the world — The Kingdoms of the world will 
become the Kingdom of God and his Christ. 
But the Kingdom grows as it masters individual 
human lives and makes them the means and the 
instruments of our Lord's further self-mani- 
festation. It is therefore within the power of 
each one to further the coming of our Lord by 
surrender to him so complete as to be his ready 
instrument. But so long as we are holding any 
power or affection back from Christ we are de- 
laying the coming. One of the things that sad- 
dens one about one's own life is the discovery 
that there are activities of life that we are with- 
holding from our Lord. There are provinces, 
so to say, that are withdrawn from his allegiance. 
There are areas dedicated to the service of special 
sins. It is curious, this withholding of entire 
submission to Christ and his Gospel. The invita- 
tion has gone forth ; " Come, for all things are 
now ready " — but we are not ready ! So the 
servants go out into the highways and byways 
seeking for guests. Why are we not ready? 
What does our self-examination show? Does 
it show unsubmissive passions, undisciplined ap- 
petites? Does it show a shrinking dread of what 



l8o THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

would follow a complete surrender of self to 
Christ? Does it show a cherished sin clung to 
after the rest have been given up? Hear the 
urgency of our Lord's call : Come, for all things 
are now ready. The Supper waits for you! 
Why do you linger? Has the unchristian thing 
you are holding on to so much enriched your 
life that you cannot bear to give it up? Have 
you really found the answer to our Lord's ques- 
tion : " What shall a man give in exchange for 
his soul? " Have you found the precious thing 
which is worth more than the Kingdom of God? 
I think not. Come, then; give up the thing that 
is costing you so much, even the joy of complete 
self-realisation as the medium of our Lord's 
further coming. Give him your valued freedom, 
and become his slave. It is only those who have 
surrendered who know; it is only those who 
have lost self who have found its true value and 
use. It is only those who have given themselves 
in utter abandonment to the will of the Master, 
who enter into the joy of the Lord. 

Let us, then, pray, 

That we may hear our Lord's voice and follow 
him without delay. Pray that the work of the 
Kingdom may be the object of your utter self- 
devotion. 



THE CALL OF URGENCY l8l 

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of 
thy faithful people; that they plenteously bring- 
ing forth the fruits of good works, may by thee 
be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ, 
our Lord. 

There can be no manner of doubt that our 
Lord's immediate followers understood his teach- 
ing to mean that the advent of his Kingdom 
with power would take place within their life- 
time. There are phrases which Christ uses that 
taken by themselves would justify such a belief. 
" Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, 
till the Son of man be come/' " Verily I say 
unto you, this generation shall not pass, till all 
these things be fulfilled." The earliest preach- 
ing of the Apostles is filled with a sense of the 
imminence of the Coming. 

Time demonstrated that the Coming would be 
gradual; and more mature meditation on our 
Lord's teaching gave proper emphasis to those 
elements of it which indicated the coming of the 
Kingdom as the result of growth and develop- 
ment, elements found especially in the parables. 

It is hardly to be questioned, however, that we 
have swung to the far extreme of giving no at- 
tention to the Coming. What our Lord seems 
to have wished to produce in his followers was 



1 82 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

a life held ready to meet him when he came. 
We do ill to lose this sense of urgency. The 
cry rings through the Gospels and Epistles. The 
followers of the Lord are to have their lamps 
trimmed and their loins girded, and to be ever 
on the watch. " Surely I come quickly," is the 
last message of the risen Lord. It is the mark 
of a declining Church when men begin to say, 
" Where is the promise of his coming? for since 
the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they 
were from the beginning of the creation." If 
we are certain that he will come, then we shall be 
ready for him to-day. 

This sense of urgency lies back of the mis- 
sionary appeal of the Church. The fact that 
missions call out so little enthusiasm and are 
with such difficulty supported must mean that 
most Christians are indifferent to the urgency 
of the appeal. We look on with equanimity as 
generations of heathen pass through the experi- 
ence of life and go out to another world without 
having so much as heard of Christ. It is not 
true that it makes no difference whether they be- 
come Christians or no. Are the heathen, then, 
lost? One does not have to believe that the 
heathen are lost to feel that it must make a 
tremendous difference in another life whether 



THE CALL OF URGENCY 183 

they have in this life known Christ or no. Else 
what does the Incarnation mean? 

You are a Christian? Do you feel that being 
a Christian has made no difference in your life 
beyond entitling you to believe that you will be 
saved? Have you got nothing out of Chris- 
tianity in the way of spiritual development, of 
spiritual appreciation ? 

All things are now ready. I am tempted to say 
that all things are now ready — except the 
Church! The opportunity of Christianity is 
simply bewildering, The heathen world lies open 
to the Gospel as it never has before. It is urgent 
on us to come to its aid. The break-down of re- 
ligious systems in the contemporary world has 
left multitudes seeking for light. What pathetic 
multitudes they are — these seekers. How they 
are the prey of any charlatan from the East, any 
religious imposter of the West. Anyone can 
count up numbers of cults which exist simply be- 
cause of the number of empty souls longing for 
sustenance of some kind. 

What is the Church doing? — the question is 
asked over and over. Why does it not rise to the 
opportunity? The Church is working hard. It 
never has worked harder than it is working to- 
day. Let there be no mistake about that ! What 



1 84 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

is it doing? It is spending its energy on the task 
of trying to make the members of the Church 
do their ordinary Christian duty. It is preach- 
ing — to Christians! It is organising countless 
societies — for Christians ! Its clergy are run- 
ning about the streets calling on Christians to try 
to induce them to come to the services of the 
Church ! They are pleading with Christians that 
they will receive the Sacraments! And if they 
do not do this astonishing work of calling and 
pleading, Christians are angry and will not come 
to Church at all, or will go to some other parish ! 

It is the plain fact that the vast majority of 
the Church's energy, time, and money, is spent on 
its own membership ; its membership is an obliga- 
tion, not an asset. The work that should be 
effective in calling the heathen and the indiffer- 
ent into the Kingdom of God, is absorbed by 
those who are already in ! 

The individual Christian should hold himself 
ready for the call to work in the vineyard; he 
should be planning and praying for an increase 
of work. He should be urging work on the 
Church; whereas, the Church is actually urging 
work upon him — and he is resenting it ! He is 
inventing miserable excuses about his inability, his 
poverty, his weariness, and the like. He has been 
coddled and coaxed so much that he has come to 



THE CALL OF URGENCY 185 

look on himself as a valuable person in the life 
of the Church, and feels himself ill-treated if 
others do not make it plain that they agree with 
him. 

Are you a Christian ? It is a tremendous thing 
to be a Christian. It means that we have recog- 
nised that Jesus Christ came into the world and 
lived and died for us, that we might be made new 
creatures in him. It means that we have accepted 
that salvation and professed ourselves the fol- 
lowers of a crucified Master. It means that the 
Christian vocation is the supreme interest in our 
lives. It is easy enough to judge our lives: we 
have only to ask, What is my supreme interest? 
What do I most willingly give myself to? 

Do you feel the call of God a personal call, 
or has religion become a mere tradition, a matter 
of environment, or use and wont? There are 
many people whose religion is nothing but habit. 
Take them out of the environment where they are 
accustomed to practice it, and it will lapse, and 
they will not miss it! 

Examine yourself to-day, as to how much re- 
ligion means to you. Would you really find it 
hard to give it up? What would go out of your 
life that you really value if you were to abandon 
Christianity to-day ? What are you actually pay- 
ing for your religion, in terms of money, of time, 



1 86 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

of energy? Is it costing you any sort of sacri- 
fice ? Does it at all imply the Cross ? What per- 
sons are the better for the fact of your religion? 
What effect are you having on the world about 
you? On your friends? On your family? If 
you are a father or mother, what is the spiritual 
state of your family? Are your children being 
educated as Christians ? Do they love the Chris- 
tian religion because of the effect it has on you? 
Do they frequent the sacraments with you, or 
without you ? Search deep. 

Our great need is spiritual vision — the power 
to see what the meaning of the Christian life is 
and what are the opportunities that it offers us. 
It is possible for us to be languid spectators of 
the passing show, without discovering any per- 
sonal contact. " Why standest thou here ? 
Thou oughtest to become another man ! " 

There is a class of Christians who will resent 
what I have been saying — only it is most un- 
likely that they will ever see it ! They are those 
who resent the pressure of religion. Am I not 
free ? they ask. Yes : certainly. But what is 
freedom? Liberty to go your own way, regard- 
less of obligation? There is no such liberty as 
that. We may choose to ignore obligations, but 
we cannot escape the effect of them. My spiritual 



THE CALL OF URGENCY 1 87 

nature is affected by every obligation that I vio- 
late. 

Freedom is liberty to fulfill my obligations. It 
is the ability to attain the ideals of life — the 
divine ideals that are expressed in the Christ-life. 
That is what our Lord is calling us to. Come: 
for all things are now ready. All things that 
pertain to life and godliness are offered to us 
in the rich abundance of the life of the Church: 
the Catholic Faith; the Catholic Sacraments. 

We are not able to stand to one side and make 
no choice at all. We are confronted with the 
offer of the Gospel. We have to accept it or 
reject it. The pressure of the Kingdom forces 
men to choose. How have you chosen? Never 
mind others; how have you chosen? Have you 
given yourself to God in the love of Christ — 
or are you making feeble excuses? 

Come, children, on and forward! 

With us the Father goes ; 
He leads us, and he guards us 

Through thousands of our foes : 
The sweetness and the glory, 

The sunlight of his eyes, 
Make all the desert places 

To glow as Paradise. 



1 88 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Lo ! through the pathless midnight 

The fiery pillar leads, 
And onward goes the Shepherd 

Before the flock He feeds ; 
Unquestioning, unfearing, 

The lambs may follow on, 
In quietness and in confidence, 

Their eyes on Him alone. 

Come, children, on and forward! 

We journey hand in hand, 
And each shall cheer his brother 

All through the stranger land; 
And hosts of God's high angels 

Beside us walk in white; 
What wonder if our singing 

Make music through the night? 

Come, children, on and forward! 

Each hour nearer home ! 
The pilgrim days speed onward, 

And soon the last will come. 
All hail ! O golden city ! 

How near the shining towers ! 
Fair gleams the Father's palace: 

That radiant home of ours. 

On ! dare and suffer all things ! 

Yet but a stretch of road, 
Then wondrous words of welcome, 

And then the Face of God. 



THE CALL OF URGENCY 189 

The world, how small and empty ! 

Our eyes have looked on Him ; 
The mighty Sun has risen, 

The taper burneth dim. 

Far through the depths of Heaven 

Our Jesus leads His own, 
The Mightiest, the Fairest, 

Christ ever, Christ alone. 
Led captive by His sweetness, 

And dowered with His bliss, 
Forever He is ours, 

Forever we are His. 1 

1 Gerhardt Ter Steegen. 



XIV 

THE INVITATION TO COMMUNION 
5. John XXI, 12 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord: 
Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. 

Let us picture, 

^nfN early dawn by a lake — any lake you 

J 1^ know will help you to compose the scene. 

A grey mist hangs over the water, a mist which 
changes to pearl and lavender when the sun strikes 
it. Through the mist you can see the fishing 
boats, their outlines softened by the iridescent 
curtain. Dim, blue waves lap the shore. The 
noise of oars, the voices of the fishermen, come 
with startling loudness through the morning 
silence. On the shore, a solitary man looks out 
through the mist, waiting for the boat to come 
within hail. These fishermen who are returning 
from a night of fruitless fishing, are newly gone 
back to a trade which they had abandoned years 
ago. There was a day when One came and stood 

IQO 



THE INVITATION TO COMMUNION 191 

by them as they cared for the boats and the nets 
and said : " Come, and I will make you fishers of 
men," — and they left all and followed him. 
And now, after leading them to limitless trust in 
him, he had, it seemed, failed and suffered death 
at the hands of his enemies. They were left 
with shattered hopes and broken hearts. The 
vision of the Messianic Kingdom had vanished 
like the mist which is melting here on the lake 
under the rays of the rising sun. What are 
broken-hearted men to do? Life may not seem 
worth very much, and yet one has to go on liv- 
ing. So they do the natural thing* — turn to the 
ways of the old life before they were called to 
what had seemed a life mission. " Simon Peter 
saith unto them, I go a fishing. They say unto 
him, we also go with thee." So they go to a night 
of work, yielding nothing. And now, in the grey 
light, they see a form on the shore, and hear a 
voice: "Children, have ye any meat?" With 
the sound of the voice in their ears, and with 
the full net which follows their obedience to its 
direction, there comes to them the certainty which 
finds utterance in S. John, " Therefore that dis- 
ciple whom Jesus loved saith unto Peter, It is 
the Lord." How the scene on the shore comes to 
us! The eager Peter, wading ashore, but then 
held voiceless by the strangeness of the situation. 



192 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

So the other disciples, even the disciple whom 
Jesus loved, gather silent, fearful, hesitating, not 
daring to say or do anything except as Jesus bids 
them. They bring in silence the fish they had 
caught as Jesus bids them and lay them on the 
coals to broil. We gather that the meal was in 
silence — with what thoughts ? Do they think 
of the last meal they had eaten with him — the 
Supper in the Upper Chamber? Does S. John 
think of the hours that he had spent beneath the 
Cross, — of the taking down of the Body and the 
laying of it in the grave? Does S. Peter think of 
the look on the staircase when the sense of his 
vileness came back to him and he went out and 
wept bitterly ? Try to see Jesus and the disciples 
sitting about the fire on the lake shore. I fancy 
that no one ate very much ! 

Consider, first, 

That our Lord by his passage through death 
and by his Resurrection has not withdrawn to 
an infinite distance from us. Such religious 
training as we for the most part get bids us think 
of our Lord as in " heaven " which presents itself 
to our imagination as vaguely distant; a place 
which certain " go to," but from which no one 
comes. We think of the appearances of our Lord 
to his disciples, after the Resurrection as intended 



THE INVITATION TO COMMUNION I93 

to certify them of that event and to give the 
producible evidence of it to be the basis of their 
future preaching: they "did eat and drink with 
him after he rose from the dead." But while 
no doubt his appearances were intended to furn- 
ish evidence of his Resurrection, that does not 
seem to exhaust their meaning. Indeed, our 
Lord never seems at all anxious to furnish evi- 
dence that is indisputable either as to himself 
or his mission, for the purpose of dispelling 
doubt from men's minds. He does show him- 
self eager to resume relations with those who 
love and trust him, such that they may never be 
disappointed, but led on to ever deeper trust and 
love. That is, the appearances of Jesus after 
the Resurrection are not intended to make unbe- 
lief impossible; they are intended to show that 
love is unfailing : that he who loves his own, loves 
them unto the end, not only of this life, but of 
all lives; that beyond the Cross and the tomb 
there lay, not the great silence, but fathomless and 
inexhaustible love. The coming of Jesus is the 
reestablishment of personal relations with those 
who had felt their world go to pieces as the dark- 
ness came down on Calvary and the last cry went 
up from the Cross. He came back to show them 
that he is the same Master they had loved and 
trusted through the years of the ministry, to 



194 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

make them feel that they could love and trust him 
still. He came back to prove that not only had 
he survived death, in the sense of immortality, 
but that he had survived it as a human being; 
that what they had to think of in the future was 
not the Son of God who had manifested himself 
as man, and had now returned to his prein- 
carnate state of deity, but their Friend and 
Master, Jesus, still in their nature, and still un- 
der whatever changed circumstances, associating 
himself with their present lives and manifesting 
himself to them here. The Resurrection ap- 
pearances assure them of the abiding Presence of 
Jesus. 

Consider, second, 

That this great gift of our religion, the gift 
of the Incarnate Jesus surviving in the Resur- 
rection, and present with us to-day with an even 
deeper, because more purely spiritual, reality than 
he was to his Apostles before his Resurrection, 
is precisely the truth that the world is most set 
upon robbing us of. The world is insistent that 
we should eliminate from our religion the abid- 
ing humanity of our Lord; that we should accept 
Sacraments which are at most modes of action 
and not modes of presence. But the presence 
of God Incarnate is essential to our religion — 



THE INVITATION TO COMMUNION 195 

to give up that were to give up all the peculiar 
significance of Christianity. The nearness of 
Jesus lies at the root of all our belief and of all 
our experience. Our spiritual experience is an 
expression of Jesus here and now. We do not 
seek him in a distant heaven, we expect him on 
the shore of our lives. It is this sense that Jesus 
is here that makes it possible for us to go on at 
all. In the experience of the presence of Jesus 
we get rid of all sense of distance, of " appealing 
to heaven," of " speaking out into the silence." 
Our prayers are said as to One who is by our 
side, listening. They are just the confidence we 
offer to the Friend. Just because we can feel the 
Presence, we can speak with intimacy, and with- 
out any sort of reserve. Our communions are 
the ways of this coming of Jesus. The soul sur- 
renders itself and opens its doors to its Guest. 
Jesus is within the life of those who love him, 
and constantly manifests his presence to them. 
He makes himself manifest in little touches of 
love which we know chiefly through our impulse 
to respond. Now, we are drawn to lift up our 
hearts and speak to him for a moment of our 
love and of our hope; now, we are flushed with 
shame as we realise some word or act of ours 
is unworthy of him, and are led to make an act 
of contrition. Again it will be a gleam of light 



I96 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

that flashes into the mind giving us understand- 
ing and guidance. One day we are led to seek 
him in the pages of the Bible, and find him won- 
derfully there in some verse of S. Paul or S. 
John; on another, we are led to seek him in the 
hidden presence of the Tabernacle, and there com- 
mune with him heart to heart. On still another 
day we go out to find him in the lives of our 
brethren, and to love and minister to him there. 
But in all the varied moods and tenses of life 
there is for the lover one permanent fact — Jesus 
is here. 

Let us, then, pray, 

For an increasing experience of our Lord in 
our lives. Pray to find him not only in religious 
acts, but in all acts. 

O Almighty God, who hast made us in Thine 
own image, and given unto us the enjoyment of 
many excellent gifts; enable us by Thy Holy 
Spirit to use these blessings to Thy glory. Grant 
unto us a devout reverence for all Thy works. 
Pour into our hearts a true love of all those who 
are called by Thy Name. Quicken our souls 
that we at all times may be sensible of Thy Pres- 
ence ; and make us day by day more fit to see Thee 
hereafter as thou art in heaven; through Jesus 
Christ, our Lord. 



THE INVITATION TO COMMUNION 1 97 

The invitation of the risen Lord is to union 
with him and to participation in his work. In 
one sense his work for us was accomplished when 
he ascended into the heavens and sat on the right 
hand of God. The work of redemption was 
then finished; the Kingdom of heaven was opened 
to all believers, that is, the means of salvation 
were placed at the disposal of everyone who 
would use them. 

But in another sense, the work of the Kingdom 
was just beginning. What had been won for 
men, must now be offered to men. Therefore 
the King sends forth his servants, saying, " Be- 
hold, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and 
my fatlings are killed; come unto the marriage." 
So the work of the Kingdom stretches out be- 
fore us. Each generation, as it comes upon the 
stage, is summoned to take up the work at the 
point where its predecessor laid it down, and to 
go on with it. We are each called to contribute 
to this work. We shall never in, this world 
know the full meaning of the work, or the im- 
portance of our part in it. But we do know that 
we are held responsible for the execution of a 
certain part, which cannot be handed over to 
some one else but must remain undone, if we do 
not do it. No one can do two men's work in the 
Kingdom of God. Neither can we altogether 



I98 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

pick out our own work. We are assigned work 
here or there as the Master wills. Our life is con- 
trolled by our vocation. " Having then gifts dif- 
fering according to the grace that is given to us, 
whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to 
the proportion of faith: or ministry, let us wait 
on our ministering: or he that teacheth, on teach- 
ing : or he that exhorteth, on exhortation : he that 
giveth, let him do it with simplicity; he that 
ruleth, with diligence; he that showeth mercy, 
with cheerfulness." 

But in order to do the work at all there must 
be in us the strength to do it. There are those 
who think that spiritual work may be done and 
spiritual results attained, without any sort of 
preparation; that all that is needed is a good 
will. No doubt, the chief thing for the learner 
is a good will ; but a good will does not teach one 
anything, unless it be to be submissive to the 
teaching authority. Every Christian is bound to 
be in some sort a teacher, and therefore every 
Christian is bound to learn his trade. The trade 
of a missionary is a very exacting one. 

The strength to prosecute the work is the 
strength that comes from our keeping in close 
union with our blessed Lord. Our strength is 
the strength of Christ in us. To base work on 
anything else, is fatal. To rush out to do the 



THE INVITATION TO COMMUNION I99 

work of the Kingdom of God without having 
given ourselves to the life of the Kingdom, is 
fatal to the work. " Not by might, or by power, 
but by my Spirit." 

Our spiritual life is the functioning in us of the 
life of our Lord. We have been taken up into 
the Incarnate Life and become members of our 
Lord's Body in order that the life that is in him 
may flow out through us, so that the world see- 
ing us knit into the life of Jesus and manifesting 
that life, may be led to believe on him. 

The universe is a sacramental fact. It is an 
outward and visible sign of a grace working in it. 
That grace is the presence of God. God is im- 
manent in the universe. We learn to classify our 
observation of the universe under the conception 
of laws which express our thought of its uni- 
formity. But that uniformity is only an ex- 
pression of the constant willing of God. 

God reveals his presence in the universe fo- 
cussed, so to say, in the Incarnate God. God so 
expresses himself that he may, through union 
with our nature, bring us into closer union with 
himself. He still chooses to do this through 
the method of incorporation. (I) In baptism 
we are cleansed from all sin and taken into union 
with our Incarnate Lord and made partakers of 
the divine nature. (II) In confirmation this 



200 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

union is strengthened and clarified for us by the 
impartation to us of the Holy Ghost as an indwell- 
ing Guest. We are henceforth his temples. 
(Ill) In view of our weakness the mercy of God 
has provided the means whereby we can be re- 
stored from the disaster of sin in case it should 
overtake us. The sacrament of penance is the 
sacrament of restoration. (IV) Especially to 
be noted is the effect of the Holy Communion, 
as the sacrament of support, the means of sus- 
taining the life that has been begun. 

The Holy Communion is the special bond be- 
tween our Lord and ourselves. It is the renewal 
of his indwelling, the constant strengthening of 
his hold upon us. Our attitude toward the Holy 
Communion is that of those who feel the con- 
stant need of renewed strength. The spiritual 
strength that is imparted to us is constantly ex- 
pended in our exercise of the spiritual life. 
Whether we are resisting temptation or develop- 
ing the virtues, there is need of imparted strength. 
So we go to our Lord as he offers himself to us 
in the Communion. 

How often? What is the rule about com- 
munion? There can in the nature of the case be 
no rule for the mature Christian. Rules are for 
Children and spiritual incompetents. The only 
rule that can be given for those who are pressing 



THE INVITATION TO COMMUNION 201 

on in the way of righteousness is the rule of desire. 
I think we may safely assume that our Lord 
wants to impart himself to us as often as we want 
to receive him. 

Is this to receive the communion mechanically ? 
It is of course possible to treat it in that way. 
Any truth or practice can be misused. There 
are those who conceive the universe as a mechan- 
ical system, and not as the manifestation of God. 
But we know what the true view of the universe 
is. We know that the order of nature is the 
perfectness of his working, and not the monotony 
of a machine. Its uniformity is the uniformity 
of a will that does not change. And so the sacra- 
mental system expresses the uniformities of the 
spiritual Kingdom of Grace. 

As we do not look for constant miracles — in- 
deed constant miracles is a contradiction in terms 
— and if they do occur attribute them, not to 
lawlessness, but to laws of God that we do not 
know, or have not been able to classify; so we do 
not look for spiritual activity outside the revealed 
order of the spiritual Kingdom. We do not deny 
that such activity may occur; but its occurrence 
would simply mean that we have not grasped all 
of God's method. An action of God outside the 
sacramental system no more perplexes us than a 
material fact outside our classifications and laws. 



202 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

But you cannot build on the unusual and the 
exceptional. You must build on the known. 
You cannot build the spiritual life on the possi- 
bility that God will act in ways other than those 
which he has revealed. If we do not know that 
there is a spiritual order in the life of the Chris- 
tian, we cannot conduct a spiritual life at all. We 
can only look for happy accidents. 

The sacraments are no more magic than the 
law of gravitation. Rather, it is reliance on 
magic to assume that God will conduct our spir- 
itual training by a series of indeterminate and 
unrelated acts. The growth in holiness of a 
soul is not a series of unrelated events. 

The devotional — ascetic and mystical — the- 
ology of the Church is an attempt to ascertain 
and register the laws of the Kingdom of God. 
If there are no laws, or if they cannot be ascer- 
tained, we live in spiritual chaos, and not in a 
world (cosmos) at all. And as scientific progress 
is conditioned on the ascertaining, registering and 
obeying of the laws of the natural world; so spir- 
itual progress is conditioned on the like ascer- 
taining, registering and obeying the laws of the 
spiritual life. 

The spiritual life therefore is not a mystery 
that each one has to solve for himself. Its roads 
are already charted. The experience of the 



THE INVITATION TO COMMUNION 203 

saints is an uniform experience. Their lives are 
noteworthy, not as " miracles of grace," but as 
instances of the uniform working of spiritual 
laws; they are lives of obedience, assuming the 
uniformity of spiritual nature. 

The conception of the Christian as a new Co- 
lumbus, going out to the exploration of unknown 
seas is not altogether accurate. Rather, he is a 
voyager on well known seas. What is new, is 
not the sea, but his experience of it. There 
would be small use in speaking or writing of the 
spiritual life at all, if it were an unique personal 
adventure. But these facts do not detract from 
the mystery and wonder of the spiritual life, any 
more than the mystery and wonder of the heavens 
are destroyed by the fact that others have 
looked on them before we trained our telescope 
on the stars. 

Bread that cometh down from Heaven, 

Fruit of the eternal tree ; 
Banquet which my God hath given 

Even unto me; 
Lo, before the world that scorneth, 

I give thanks and eat, 
At the table in the desert, 

Spread with heavenly meat; 
Wine of the divinest gladness, 

Milk and honey sweet. 



204 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

In the wilderness unwatered, 

In the lonely land, 
This the feast of God made ready 

By His Mighty Hand; 
Thither came I, spent and weary, 

Hungry and athirst, 
From the wastes of thorn and thistl 

Of the land accurst, 
There to find the feast where angels 

Serve, but may not share — 
None but Christ and His redeemed ones 

Gathered round Him there. 
There the desert blossometh, 

There the waters spring; 
There the Psalteries make music, 

There the blessed sing. 
By the Heavenly Banquet strengthened, 

Short the way to me, 
Over moor and fen and mountain, 

O'er the pathless sea ; 
For the glory of His City 

Shines along the road 
Where the feet unwearied journey 

To the Home of God. 



XV 

THE INVITATION TO CHILDREN 
S. Matthew XIX, 14 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord: 

Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, 
to come unto me : for of such is the Kingdom of 
Heaven. 

Let us picture, 

^^^HIS scene of our Lord blessing little chil- 
^^X dren. Most likely, some mothers, noting 
his kindness, thought to bring their children to 
him for his blessing. We see them coming 
timidly, not knowing how they will be received. 
But see ! before they reach Jesus they are stopped 
by the Apostles. We seem to see the Apostles 
rather fussily active about our Lord, as though 
they thought of themselves as the ushers at the 
court of a king. " No ! you cannot bring children 
in here. They are not ill, are they? Jesus is 
very busy healing people. He has to see a delega- 
tion from Jerusalem. Then he is going to begin 

205 



206 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

teaching, and we cannot disturb him. Why 
should you expect that he would stop to bless a 
baby? " " But when Jesus heard it, he was much 
displeased." Children are important to Jesus. 
He, first, of men, made known to us their true 
worth. " Their angels do always behold the face 
of your Father which is in heaven." " Except 
ye be converted, and become as little children, ye 
shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven." 
" Whoso shall offend one of these little ones 
who believe in me, it were better for him that a 
millstone were hanged about his neck, and that 
he were drowned in the depth of the sea." " Suf- 
fer the little children, and forbid them not, to 
come unto me: for of such is the Kingdom of 
Heaven." " See our Lord taking the children 
one by one in his arms and blessing them and giv- 
ing them back to their mothers. Jesus came as a 
little child and had been sheltered by the ador- 
ing love of his spotless Mother. His coming 
gave a new consecration to childhood; but his 
disciples had not learned this lesson. They stand 
a little abashed, while our Lord, putting them 
aside, called the children to him. As the mothers 
go away we catch a little glance of triumph 
thrown at the mortified Apostles; a little toss of 
the head by those who, after all, knew what our 
Lord would do. The momentary displeasure of 



THE INVITATION TO CHILDREN 207 

Jesus passes away in a smile as he sees the dis- 
comfiture of his followers. He took the oppor- 
tunity, may be, to gather them about him and 
explain the worth of children. He let them see 
the wonder of the purity which the angels guard, 
and before which the gates of Heaven swing open. 
Perhaps he let them into the secret of the bap- 
tism which they were later on to minister, and 
which was to be the means of taking little chil- 
dren into Christ, enduing them with eternal life, 
and making them partakers of the divine nature. 

Consider, first, 

It is with our Lord's birth that a new era be- 
gins for childhood. There was, no doubt, a cer- 
tain appreciation of the beauty of childhood be- 
fore our Lord came as a child. Still, one feels 
that the Old Testament does not make much of 
childhood : it committed the child to God, but it 
did not make much of the child as such — he 
was blessed for what he was to be in the King- 
dom. Outside the Covenant, in the Greek world 
especially, there is a keen feeling for child-life, 
but no realization of its sanctity. The most 
horrible treatment of children could go on un- 
rebuked by the side of such poetic appreciation. 
It is doubtful if human beings ever truly respect 
anything unless they regard it as sacred. The 



208 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

decay of the conception of sanctity in modern 
life has been followed by an appalling increase 
in levity and vulgarity. Our Lord's teaching 
expects of us a great reverence and care in the 
treatment of child-life. From the point of view 
of the Christian religion children are not toys to 
amuse us, not angelic beings to sentimentalise 
over, not predestined slaves of the modern in- 
dustrial system to be carefully prepared for their 
fate, but children of the Father, to be brought 
to him and to be trained in his love. From the 
cradle of any baby the imagination sees paths 
running out in all directions, any one of which 
may be chosen in the future. But which one 
will actually be chosen, depends, how largely! 
on the care and training, the influences which 
are thrown about the open years. Those are 
terrible words of our Lord : " Whoso shall of-- 
fend one of these little ones — it were better 
for him that a millstone were hanged about his 
neck and he were drowned in the depths of the 
sea." They are words which do not seem to 
have exclusive application to the actual leading of 
a child into sin ; they have a broader application 
to those whom the education of a child is com- 
mitted. Do they not indeed imply the condem- 
nation of godless educational systems? It is out 
of the early teaching, the family life, the school, 



THE INVITATION TO CHILDREN 200, 

the social environment, that the influences come 
that shape the life for good or evil. It is upon 
the social state into which the child is born that 
the shadow of our Lord's warning rests : do not 
offend. As we look out into the life of to-day 
and see, not only its godless education, but the 
associations and amusements that it provides for 
boys and girls, one feels that the execution of the 
sentence cannot be far off. A society that de- 
liberately corrupts its children must come to a 
stern judgment. 

Consider, second, 

If we are to have a proper appreciation of our 
Lord's teaching we must read it through the 
child-spirit. " Except ye be converted, and be- 
come as little children, ye shall not enter into 
the Kingdom of Heaven." The prime quality 
of childhood is its teachableness — its open mind. 
The child puts no obstacles in the way of instruc- 
tion. It is very different with the adult. He 
approaches new truth with all sorts of reserves 
and hesitations. When it is asked of him that 
he go on to greater appreciation of the Gospel and 
of the Gospel-life, he is obstructed and inhibited 
by fears as to the demands that will be made on 
his life if he yields, as to the sacrifices that will 
be called for. He is unable to yield simply to the 



210 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

" thus saith the Lord." To the adult his religion 
is only one among many interests, and very rarely 
the supreme interest. Consider, — how is it with 
you? What in life do you value most? What 
would you surrender last, if you were called on to 
make choice? In what do you find the most in- 
tense interest ? I do not mean what takes up the 
most time or occupies the most attention : inevi- 
tably, business, family matters and so on do that. 
But what is the central interest which is control- 
ling all the rest ? What is controlling and shaping 
your business activity, directing the life of the 
family ? It is not what is at the circumference but 
what is at the center that is of supreme impor- 
tance. Is your mind open, and are your ears at- 
tentive to the message of God? Have you eager- 
ness to learn; have you, before all else, humility 
to hear and to receive? The voices which come 
to us in later life are terribly perplexing: there is 
a crying of lo! here, and lo! there. Have you 
that simple, childlike love of our Lord which will 
enable you to distinguish between the voices, and 
pick out his amid all the tangle of sounds? We 
know that the child, lost in a crowd, will turn at 
the sound of his mother's voice heard amid a hun- 
dred others because he has been accustomed to 
listen to it and to love it. If you are accustomed 
to listen to the voice of our Lord, and to love jt, 



THE INVITATION TO CHILDREN 211 

you will not be deceived by other voices, however 
attractive ! 

Let us, then, pray, 

For the humility and teachableness of a little 
child. 

O Lord Jesus Christ, we beseech Thee by the 
innocence and obedience of Thy holy childhood, 
and by Thy reverence and love for little children, 
do Thou guard the children of our land; do Thou 
preserve their innocence; strengthen them when 
ready to slip, recover the wandering, and remove 
all that may hinder them from being brought up 
in Thy faith and love: who livest and reignest 
with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one 
God, world without end. 

The Incarnation of our Lord has had a deep 
effect on the life of Children. The narratives of 
the infancy have left an indelible mark. They 
have entered deep into the imagination of the 
race, and all childhood where they are known is 
influenced by Bethlehem and Nazareth. 

It is not necessary to draw the dark line that 
is often drawn around the life of children in 
heathen lands. No doubt, parents everywhere 
have loved and cared for their children. The 
writings of Tagore show a beautiful appreciation 
of childhood. The point is that the Christian 



212 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

religion can do for children what no other can. 
It alone understands children in their relation to 
God, and the means whereby God wishes to in- 
fluence them. 

The Christian religion starts from a belief in 
the capacity of the child to know and love God. 
It does not wait for the child to grow up to teach 
it the faith of Christ. " The child cannot under- 
stand," we are told. Well, it learns as it goes 
along ; and one does not have to be a learned per- 
son to pray to God. 

The Christian religion believes in the possibil- 
ity of sacramental action on the spiritual nature of 
the child, and therefore brings the child to bap- 
tism and confirmation. " The child does not un- 
derstand what it is doing," says the objector. 
The child understands that it is coming to God, 
its Father, for his blessing, and that is all it is 
doing. In the sacraments something is being 
done to the child, there is an action of God on its 
soul, regenerating, renewing, strengthening. The 
child does not have to be a theologian to be con- 
firmed; he has to want the gift of God. 

The Church's theory of the spiritual life is that 
it is the work of God the Holy Spirit, working 
through means that are divinely established. 
These means are to bring God to the child and the 
child to God. What is necessary to understand 



THE INVITATION TO CHILDREN 213 

is that God is offering a blessing ; what it is neces- 
sary to do is not to oppose the will of God, but 
to have a simple faith in him. God will always 
work for us — children or adults — if we will 
only let him. Our attempts to help are for the 
most part hindrances. A mother thinks she is 
taking a proper care of her child when she says, 
" He is not old enough to be confirmed." As a 
matter of fact she is keeping the child away from 
a blessing that God wants to give. 

The Church's theory of spiritual life is that it 
unfolds gradually under the influence of the grace 
that is ministered to it, and that if no obstacles are 
put in the way, the life will unfold from inno- 
cence to sanctity. This is not an unreal optimism. 
The Church is not disregarding facts. Its use of 
the sacrament of penance shows that it appreciates 
the very real temptations to which the child is 
exposed. 

It would be fatal to ignore the place of tempta- 
tion in the life of the child. He must face the 
tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Temp- 
tation is the divine method of training. The soul 
that has not been tested is weak, or at least has no 
ground for assuming that it is strong. A convic- 
tion of strength is the outcome of victory over 
temptation. Am untried strength is an unknown 
strength. 



214 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

The chances of the modern child in the face of 
temptation cannot be viewed optimistically. 

The divine purpose for the child is that its first 
spiritual training should come to it through the 
family. But under present conditions the family, 
instead of being the training place of the child in 
holiness, is his greatest danger. The Christian 
family has almost gone out of existence. How 
many children are there whose religious training 
in the family goes farther than being taught some 
very elementary prayers, and being told that he 
should not do certain things : what things, ap- 
pears to be largely a matter of luck. 

The child early learns to observe that the family 
takes a very limited interest in religion. That 
they do not put in practice very much of what he 
is taught is the Christian life. Many times he is 
left to practice the religion of the family by him- 
self, with the natural feeling that as soon as he is 
out of leading-strings, he will be allowed to drop 
it altogether. He would be much better of! in a 
family frankly heathen. 

And when the average child comes to face his 
education, he finds, except under rare circum- 
stances, there is no provision made for Christian 
training. The school frankly ignores religion ; or 
else it treats it in a way that does not suggest that 



THE INVITATION TO CHILDREN 21$ 

it has any importance as compared with latin 
grammar or basket-ball. It is probably better 
that the child should be in a public school where 
religion is just ignored as no concern of the State, 
than to be in a private school, where it is nominally 
respected, but where it is quite ineffectually 
taught. What chance has the child, when he 
passes from the lower grades of education to one 
of the colleges which Christian men endow to 
teach infidelity to their children? 

There is nothing in the modern child's educa- 
tion that at all fits him to meet the lure of the 
world. " He has been taught morals? " Not at 
all. It is a chance if his parents or teachers so 
much as know what Christian morals is. What 
he is in fact taught under the guise of morals is a 
set of conventions and taboos which are current 
in the social set in which he is being brought up. 
These have little if anything to do with the Chris- 
tian religion. They have no impelling power and 
no restraining force in the face of strong tempta- 
tion. 

And there is no avoiding the temptation he is 
bound to meet. The world, the flesh and the 
devil press themselves on his notice. And he 
finds sin very attractive. It is useless to talk 
platitudes about the unsatisfying nature of sin. 



2l6 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Sin gives just what it promises — a certain imme- 
diate enjoyment and gratification. That really is 
what a child wants. And as he has never been 
taught self-restraint, he takes it. 

What have we to set over against all this? 
What spiritual training does the Church offer the 
child? A Sunday School which under the cir- 
cumstances cannot be other than ineffective. At 
best, it is supposed to supplement the family train- 
ing — which in reality does not exist. I have 
very rarely known a mother who took so much 
interest in her child's Sunday School lesson as 
to see that it was learned. It is, of course, use- 
less to speak of fathers. I think that most 
priests would agree that the best results in 
spiritual training were attained where the family 
is utterly indifferent — so indifferent as not to 
attempt to do anything. A child not inter- 
fered with is likely to follow spiritual prompt- 
ings. 

The spiritual life of a child is a very delicate 
thing. It needs to be surrounded by positive in- 
fluences of a constantly helpful sort. The nega- 
tive should be reduced to the lowest terms, and 
the positive dwelt upon. The influences of the 
environment are constantly and silently working. 
The family talk is of tremendous importance. 
What is the impression that the child gets at the 



THE INVITATION TO CHILDREN 21 7 

lunch table, when the family has just returned 
from Church? 

The books that are to be read should be chosen 
with the greatest care. The plastic mind of the 
child is constantly being influenced by what he 
reads or what is read to him. He needs not books 
that will interest him, but that will direct his in- 
terest rightly. 

His prayer life needs watching. It is ridicu- 
lous, or rather it is tragic, to teach a child a few 
prayers and then do nothing more. Prayers 
should be constantly changed with the changing 
life. New objects of prayer should be intro- 
duced, lest interest wane. The prayer-life should 
be treated as a growing life which needs constant 
care and nourishment. 

The child needs moral instruction in regard to 
the ordinary temptations of life at the time when 
these will appeal to him. There has been a hys- 
terical and morbid excitement about sex training. 
The necessary instruction in such matters can be 
given very easily and simply, and without ex- 
citement. 

Above all, the child ought to be taught the 
greatness of self-control. If he looks on him- 
self as a responsible being who has to face tempta- 
tion, and to whom the grace of God is always ac- 
cessible, he will meet life well. 



2l8 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

I give you the end of a golden string; 

Only wind it into a ball, — 
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate 

Built in Jerusalem's wall. 1 

1 Blake. 



XVI 

THE INVITATION TO THE THIRSTY 
5". John VII, 37 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord: 

If any man thirst, let him come unto me and 
drink. 

Let us picture, 

}^n HIS scene at the feast in Jerusalem. Each 
V ^v morning during the time of the celebra- 
tion, water was drawn from the Pool of Siloam 
and carried in a golden vessel by a priest, and 
poured out over the altar on which the morning 
sacrifice was to be offered. It was discontinued 
on the last day of the feast, the discontinuance 
signifying that Israel had now come to the land 
of pools of water. It was on this day, when no 
water was drawn, that our Lord offered himself 
as the fulfilment of Israel's hopes : "If any man 
thirst, let him come unto me and drink. He that 
believeth on me, as the Scripture hath said, out of 
his belly shall flow rivers of living water." Try 
219 



220 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

to see Jesus offering himself to the crowd gathered 
at the Feast of Tabernacles. There was some- 
thing deeply impressive about his manner and his 
words so that for the moment the volatile crowd 
was influenced. " Many of the people, therefore, 
when they heard this saying, said, of a truth this 
is the prophet. Others said, this is the Christ." 
But the old doubt returns to divide them : " But 
some said, shall Christ come out of Galilee ?" 
All their discussion was fruitless. A crowd never 
gets anywhere until it finds a leader. And for 
this crowd leaders are at hand in the chief priests. 
So the words of Jesus stir the people for the mo- 
ment and then the impression passes. If our 
Lord at that moment had offered himself as a 
national leader no doubt he would have found 
many who would have accepted him. As he 
could not offer himself as a leader for their na- 
tionalistic aspirations, but only as a guide to 
spiritual ideals, he failed of a following. That 
was always his fate. When men found that he 
called them to a spiritual Kingdom, they declined 
his invitation and left him to be crucified. That 
has always been his fate. When the Church has 
identified itself with some cause of immediate 
human interest, men have been ready to applaud 
the Church, though that in reality was the hour 
of its defeat. When the Church declines the 



THE INVITATION TO THE THIRSTY 221 

alliance with Caesar and pursues its ideals of an 
unworldly and sacrificed life, then men fall away; 
but then is the hour of its triumph. Our Lord's 
triumph is not the triumph of numbers but the 
triumph of spiritual motive. He has not gained 
a disciple when a man follows him for any equiv- 
alent of the loaves and fishes ; he has only won a 
victory when his Spirit entering in possesses the 
soul of a man, and, casting out the devils of 
worldliness, dwells there in security. 

Consider, first, 

The difficulty we have in making full surrender 
to our Lord ! Yet it is he alone who can satisfy 
all our legitimate desires. All the worthy crav- 
ings of our nature find their accomplishment in 
him. If any man thirst, let him come: and it 
makes no difference what his thirst is. Our 
nature is essentially spiritual and our spiritual 
powers are seeking development and realisation. 
But they are hindered in their development by a 
mass of superficial appetites which clamor for 
gratification, and which, just because of their ob- 
trusive voices, impress us with a sense of their 
importance. A child's love of noise and taste 
for sweets develops long before you can call out 
any disciplined control of impulse or appetite: 
but it does not follow that the impulses and the 



222 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

appetites are the important things about the child. 
Nor is it true at any time of life. The deep- 
seated capacities for spiritual living, the qualities 
which, under control, can bring forth the fruits of 
the Spirit, are the truly important endowments of 
a man. But while superficial powers and appe- 
tites grow rankly by correspondence with the 
world in which they find a significance and grati- 
fication, the fruits of the Spirit grow only through 
union with our Blessed Lord. By virtue of his 
union with us he communicates to us his Holy 
Spirit which becomes in us a fountain of water 
springing up into Eternal Life: becomes in us, 
that is, a source of energy which can transform 
our lives into the likeness of our Incarnate Lord. 
It is a question, then, of what we value, for what 
we value, we can easily obtain. I say easily be- 
cause in reality there is no more difficulty in culti- 
vating virtues than vices. It is true, that what- 
ever return we may expect from sin we may 
expect at once, while the fruits of virtue are slow 
in coming to maturity. But that does not mean 
that one is easier or more certain of attainment 
than the other. It does mean that the attainment 
of the fruits of the Spirit require a persistence 
and continuity of willing to bring them to ma- 
turity that the fruits of sin do not. But our 
Lord is the guarantee that fidelity to his ideal of 



THE INVITATION TO THE THIRSTY 223 

character will, if we faint not, be crowned with 
success, and that his Spirit, once accepted, will 
be the Guide of life, will lead us safely to the 
green pastures of Eternal Life. 

Consider, second, 

Whether you have found in our Lord complete 
satisfaction of your desires. I do not mean have 
you wholly attained the accomplishment of your 
spiritual ambitions; that will never be the case 
in this life. But while we find the Spiritual life 
which results from union with our Lord and the 
possession of his Spirit a constantly growing and 
expanding experience, we also find that it is a 
satisfying experience. Consciousness of imper- 
fection there must be. Indeed, this paradox is 
true: The more perfect we grow, the less per- 
fect we seem ; seem to ourselves, I mean, because 
increasing spiritual attainment means increasing 
insight and increasing severity of judgment. For 
when we say that the Spiritual Life is a satisfying 
experience we mean, not that we are increasingly 
satisfied with self but with our Lord. We find 
in him the means of satisfying all in our nature 
that is pure and godlike. And, amid all the stress 
and strain of our battle with opposing forces — 
the world, the flesh and the devil — we find the 



224 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

growing experience we have of our Lord trans- 
lated into interior strength and peace. The battle 
is severe, but we go to it light hearted as those 
who are sure of the victory. But this is only on 
condition of a progressive effort to realise all 
that union with our Lord means. If the water 
of the Spirit is to flow from him to us there must 
be on our side a great eagerness. That is a con- 
stant point of failure: there are a great many 
who are willing to be saved ; there are not so 
many who will be saved. But all the energy can- 
not be on the divine side; if there is an energy in 
giving there must also be an energy in receiving. 
Passive reception is not enough. We must so 
receive the energy of the divine life as to trans- 
form it into the energy of our own human living. 
Are you quite sure that that is what is taking place 
in your experience ? The divine offer is made to 
you: "If any man thirst, let him come." Have 
you come ? Have you cared enough to be active ? 
Has the desirability of our Lord overcome the 
inertia of acquired habit, or the opposition of 
rooted sin? See these people on the last day of 
the feast listening to our Lord's invitation to 
come; and then just disputing among themselves 
whether he is the Prophet, or the Christ, or 
whether indeed it is not stupid to expect either 
the Prophet or the Christ to come from Galilee! 



THE INVITATION TO THE THIRSTY 225 

Are you still hesitating, doubting, withholding full 
allegiance? Are you wondering about Christ 
rather than finding him wonderful? Have you 
so come to the Living Water that flows from him 
that your soul is filled with the divine Presence? 

Let us, then, pray, 

For the fulness of his grace. Pray for the 
Holy Spirit to fill you with the sense of the divine 
Presence. 

O God, forasmuch as without Thee, we are not 
able to please Thee; mercifully grant that Thy 
Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our 
hearts, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

As we read history we are liable to become 
very pessimistic about the religious attainments of 
humanity; but there is one thing that stands out 
clearly, which is that humanity needs God and 
knows that it needs God. The human race may 
seem very blundering and incompetent in its re- 
ligions, but it is quite certain that it needs a re- 
ligion of some sort and never gives over the 
quest for it. Man is religious by nature, and the 
occasional atheists who appear are clearly arti- 
ficial products. 

" My soul is athirst for God ; yea, even for the 
living God," might well be taken as the motto of 
the whole race. The workings of the religious 



226 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

instinct in the attempt to find God, or to picture to 
itself what God is like, make up the greater part 
of man's spiritual history. Much of the seeking, 
guided only by the instinct, leads to things curious 
or grotesque; in the nature of the case the full 
truth about religion could only come to man 
through revelation. 

It is revelation that in due time crowns man's 
seeking after God. Our Lord's promise to such 
seekers is, " Blessed are they that hunger and 
thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled." 
The promise is to those who seek ; we must look 
within ourselves for a certain spirit of discontent 
with our present attainment and accomplishment. 
Spiritual contentment is a mark of sloth. 

According to S. John's explanation, the Living 
Water that our Lord will give is the Holy Spirit. 
And it is this Spirit who comes to us who are 
united to our Lord's divine humanity and who 
creates in us the desire of spiritual things. He 
inspires us with spiritual ideals which can only be 
satisfied by the possession of God. 

I suppose that when our devotional training is 
slight we are apt to ask ourselves what is meant 
by a thirst for God, and do not always find it easy 
to answer. We take up the language of devo- 
tional literature and try to make something of it 



THE INVITATION TO THE THIRSTY 22J 

and are not very successful and put it aside as un- 
real. But we need to beware lest we think that 
what is unreal to us in a. certain stage of devo- 
tional experience is unreal to others or in itself. 
There is no danger greater than the making of our 
own experience the standard by which all ex- 
perience is to be tried. 

Rather, we must bring our own experience into 
contrast with the more advanced experience of 
others with a view to finding what we lack and in 
what direction we need to work. 

We can do this readily enough by trying our- 
selves by the standard of the Old and New Testa- 
ments. They are both saturated with the convic- 
tion of the need of God, and the conviction that 
God is accessible. In prophets and psalmists we 
find men of wonderful and rich religious experi- 
ence. They have found God. God has come 
into their lives to enrich them and guide them. 
They find no difficulty in opening their lives to 
God and there is no doubt that the voice which 
comes to them is the voice of God. 

In even a higher sense is this true of the New 
Testament saints. Recall the details of the 
spiritual experience of S. Paul, for example; or 
the sort of experience of God that is back of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews. God to these men is not 



228 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

a difficult problem to be solved, he is a personal 
friend with whom they have continual converse 
and on whom they continually rely. 

The same thing is true of the long line of de- 
votional writers of the Church. There is a devo- 
tional tradition running down through the ages. 
There never has been a time in the history of the 
Church when its inner life of sanctity was not 
being expressed through the writings of mystics 
and poets. We can hardly charge with unreality 
all these who have given the highest expression 
to the fact of the divine union with man. Our 
humility requires us to recognise that we are 
lacking in spiritual attainment so long as the writ- 
ings of the saints remain sealed books to us. 

What then is this thirst? 

It is what in matters of scientific or philosophi- 
cal import is called the desire for the truth. 
Every one talks about it as though it were the 
consuming passion of humanity. I confess that 
it does not seem to me that the passion for truth 
of the average student is overwhelming. It is 
usually a very mild desire that manages to tolerate 
in life a good many other desires without any ap- 
parent sense of disproportion or discomfort. 
Still, the phrase expresses an ideal. The student 
recognises that what is the justification of his life 
is the passion for truth. 



THE INVITATION TO THE THIRSTY 229 

Then, there are great men of science, great 
artists and so on, in whom the thirst is evident as a 
consuming passion. They are quite willing to 
sacrifice the things that most men count valuable 
in order that they may attain to their ideal. They 
are willing to watch and labor and hunger to gain 
some addditional scrap of knowledge, some added 
power of artistic expression. It is no exaggera- 
tion to say of many men of any generation that 
they literally sacrifice their lives to the attainment 
of truth. 

It is not otherwise with the Christian. He 
recognises God as the end of his life. To know 
God more and more is his unwavering aim. 
There are other aims that he tolerates. Still we 
cannot say that on that account he is dishonest 
when he expresses his ideal in the highest terms. 
While there are of necessity minor aims which are 
due to his life in a human society, the important 
point is that his life shall be controlled by a spirit- 
ual principle. There is a recognised action of 
the Spirit on his spiritual nature that impels him 
to seek the will of God. His conscience is rest- 
less in the presence of his own imperfect work. 
He feels the urge of the ideal of perfection and is 
discontented so long as he is not striving upward 
toward some vision of God. Indeed, we might 
express it that his life is governed by vision. 



23O THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

The desire for God is a real desire wherever 
there is a sincere effort after goodness. If we 
try to make actual the thing that we see, we are 
striving toward God. This desire runs through 
all degrees of intensity, and many stages of ac- 
complishment. It rises and falls with time and 
circumstance. To-day it is very vivid and we are 
eager and hopeful, and rejoice; tomorrow it is 
gone and we are depressed, and doubtful of all 
the experience of the past. 

It finds its most intense expression in the writ- 
ings of the saints. God the Holy Ghost has led 
them to record for our learning the experience of 
God that they have found in their search for him. 
They are seekers all their lives long, and here in 
their writings is the proof that their search has not 
been in vain. God has revealed himself to them 
in many ways, and the result is that their lives 
have given manifold response, with the result that 
the life of sanctity is the most varied of all lives. 

To appreciate the meaning of sanctity we must 
give days and nights to the study of the lives of 
the saints. They are the spiritual heroes of the 
Church, and our own spiritual ancestors and ex- 
amples. It is in them that we find revealed the 
possibilities of the life of sanctity. 

They are not average Christians. They are 
normal Christians. Our mistake is to regard 



THE INVITATION TO THE THIRSTY 23 1 

them as exceptional and therefore unimportant 
as examples. They are, no doubt, quantitatively 
exceptional in the Church; not sporadic varia- 
tions from the type, but the very type itself. We 
have no right to set for our standard anything but 
the type. No medical student would think of 
taking the average achievement in the medical pro- 
fession as the ideal to be aimed at. Nor should 
any Christian be satisfied with the average 
achievement of the Christian Church. We look 
to the saint to find what our expression of the 
Christian life should be. 

Of course our relation to our ideal is quite 
other than that of the medical or other student 
to the leaders of his profession. Both the ideal 
toward which we work and the power by which 
we work toward it is supplied to us from without. 
The Christian life is a revealed life. And it is 
God that worketh in us both to will and to do his 
good pleasure. Our life is a life of cooperation 
with God: he gives the power and we cooperate 
by the surrender of our wills to him, becoming 
thus the instruments of his working. 

We are mastered by the beauty of the ideal life 
as our Lord shows it to us and exemplifies it in his 
own life and in the lives of his saints. The more 
we yield ourselves and live into the ideal, the more 
comprehensible it becomes. 



232 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

No coward soul is mine, 

No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere ; 
I see Heaven's glories shine, 

And faith shines equal, arming me from fear. 

O God within my breast, 

Almighty, ever-present Deity ! 
Life — that in me has rest, 

As I — undying Life — have power in Thee ! 

Vain are the thousand creeds 

That move men's hearts : unutterably vain ; 
Worthless as withered weeds, 

Or idlest froth amid the boundless main, 

To waken doubt in one 

Holding so fast by Thine infinity ; 
So surely anchored on 

The steadfast rock of immortality. 

With wide-embracing love 

Thy Spirit animates eternal years, 
Pervades and broods above, 

Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears. 

Though earth and man were gone, 

And suns and universes cease to be, 
And Thou wert left alone, 

Every existence would exist in Thee. 



THE INVITATION TO THE THIRSTY 233 

There is not room for death 

Nor atom that His might could render void : 
Thou — THOU art Being and Breath, 

And what Thou art may never be destroyed :* 

1 E. Bronte. 




XVII 

THE INVITATION TO KNOWLEDGE 

Revelation IV, i 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord: 

Come up hither, and I will show you things 
which must be hereafter. 

Let us picture, 

JOHN, looking through the door opened in 
'. heaven. He was " in the Spirit " when he 
saw the things which he undertakes to describe to 
us. And we have to be in the Spirit, that is given 
up to the guidance and illumination of the Holy 
Spirit, if we are to understand him. It is the 
Spirit which takes of the things of Christ and 
shows them unto us. Through the door that is 
opened, S. John sees, first of all, in the midst of 
heaven, the Throne and the Sitter upon the 
Throne. And what impresses S. John about him 
is not, as we, perhaps, should have imagined, the 
awful majesty of him whom he sees; S. John 
is not filled with fear as he beholds him that 

234 



THE INVITATION TO KNOWLEDGE 235 

sitteth upon the Throne; but he is filled with a 
sense of the beauty of God. " And he that sat 
was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine 
stone : and there was a rainbow round about the 
Throne, in sight like unto an emerald." And as 
his eye wanders from the central Figure and 
takes in the rest of heaven, as it notes the Elders 
and the living Creatures, he perceives that they 
do not prostrate themselves in fear, but that the 
feelings which they express are feelings of wor- 
ship and praise: " And when those living Crea- 
tures give glory and honor and thanks to him that 
sat on the Throne, who liveth forever and ever, 
the four and twenty Elders fall down before him 
that sat on the Throne, and worship him that 
liveth forever and ever, and cast their crowns 
before the Throne, saying, thou art worthy, O 
Lord, to receive glory and honor and power : for 
thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure 
they were and were created." So heaven comes 
to us in terms of life and beauty : of life active in 
the praise of God. These symbolic figures about 
the Throne are the representatives of all creation 
offering itself to the Creator. Then, from the 
worship of the Creator we pass to the adoration 
of the Lamb; we see the Elders and the living 
Creatures prostrate before him, and we see him 
through the mist of the prayers of the saints 



236 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

which they pour from the golden vials. We hear 
the strains of the New Song arise till they fill all 
the heavens : " Thou art worthy to take the book, 
and open the seals thereof : for thou wast slain, 
and didst purchase us to God by thy blood out of 
every kindred and tongue and people and nation ; 
and madest us unto our God kings and priests: 
and we shall reign on the earth. And I beheld 
and heard the voice of many angels round about 
the Throne and the Living Creatures and the 
Elders — saying, with a loud voice, worthy is the 
Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, 
and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, 
and blessing." Picture S. John, wrapt in vision, 
seeing these things, and then opening his eyes to 
find about him the familiar things of every day 
life! How different his life would seem now 
that he had seen reality! Would he take up the 
round of the day with distaste and weariness, or 
would he take it up with a deeper sense of conse- 
cration? I think it must have been the latter. 
I think that when he next celebrated the divine 
mysteries, and took in his hands the Bread and 
broke it and said : " This is My Body," he would 
see with his spirit the Lamb as it had been slain, 
and catch the strain of the anthem he had heard, 
as he prostrated himself before the altar of the 
earthly Church in worship. He would quite con- 



THE INVITATION TO KNOWLEDGE 237 

sciously join himself with the host of heaven as 
it falls down before the altar-throne of the Lamb. 

Consider, first, 

That heaven is not presented to us as a distant 
fact to which we are without relation, and of 
which broken echoes and rarer glimpses reach us 
now and then, — too broken and rare to permit us 
to have any real understanding of the fact. On 
the contrary, the thought given us about heaven 
is surprisingly full and rich, so much so that here 
it is possible only to indicate a point or two. 
What strikes us first is, no doubt, the fact that 
heaven is presented to us as a social fact. The 
life that goes on there is expressed in terms of 
communion, and of a communion which is essen- 
tially like the communion that we know. The 
heavenly life is expressed in such terms as honor, 
glory, thanksgiving, wisdom, blessing, strength. 
We know the meaning of these terms and feel that 
the lives of which they are the expression will not 
be strange. It is a community of distinct per- 
sonalities, where whatever riches of character we 
take with us, or hereafter develop, will remain 
our possession. Those in heaven are neither ab- 
sorbed into God and so lost to self, nor trans- 
formed into some other sort of being with no 
personal continuity with this life. Whatever of 



238 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

character-riches we may garner, whatever mature 
fruits of this life we may take with us, will prove 
of use in our intercourse with others. And as 
our acquisitions are diverse, so shall we appear 
diverse, and that diversity Will be the ground of 
mutual recognition. We expect in heaven a 
world of human beings made glad by an attained 
and growing human perfection, and, because of 
our very diversity, finding place for sympathetic 
human intercourse. We have the full right to 
infer that powers developed here will find added 
significance hereafter. It were grotesque to sup- 
pose that heaven is a scene wherein all those who 
have served God faithfully here will find what 
they have acquired in the way of spiritual attain- 
ments without meaning and without relation to 
the life they have now entered. A conception of 
the future state of the spirit as a state strictly con- 
tinuous with this and therefore intelligible in 
terms of present experience is a result of a con- 
viction of the consistency of God. When we are 
told that we do and can know nothing of the 
future our answer is that we do and can know 
much of the future because it grows out of what 
has gone before, and, whether for good or for 
evil, must be characterised by an inner con- 
sistency. 



THE INVITATION TO KNOWLEDGE 239 

Consider, second, 

That the sense of the heavenly life of the 
future as having its ground and spring in the life 
we are now leading is one of the constant features 
of New Testament teaching. Cause and effect 
as the inner account of spiritual reality is therein 
emphasised. When S. Paul says, " To be car- 
nally minded is death ; but to be spiritually minded 
is life and peace," he is expressing this law. 
When we are warned that we cannot " gather 
grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles " the same 
law is impressed upon us. " What a man soweth, 
that shall he also reap " reiterates the same fact. 
Life takes permanent distinctions here. Here- 
after it may be modified or developed in detail, but 
the general direction followed remains the same. 
There is nothing mysterious about this — the 
mystery is that men should ever have thought that 
it could be otherwise — that they should have 
imagined some magic quality in death, bringing 
about an arrest or reversal of character. Con- 
sider, whether or not hitherto, you have viewed 
your life as one fact, going in a certain direction? 
Whether or not heaven and hell have meant to 
you life worked out to ultimate conclusions on 
opposing lines? Those whom S. John sees as the 
dwellers in the heavens are not there by accident 
or favoritism but because they have chosen God 



24O THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

and held fast to him. The song that they sing 
about the Throne is essentially the same song that 
they have long been singing. Those whom they 
meet in heaven are those whom they have found 
spiritually congenial on earth — the saints whom 
they knew or would gladly have known. They 
are bound close to one another by community of 
interests. They now find intense joy in com- 
munity of thought and occupation. Those who 
now follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth, 
are those who have long followed him: what is 
now new to them is that they see his Face, not 
in vision, but unveiled. Consider, whether this 
heavenly life with its active intercourse of saints, 
its devout worship, its readiness of service, at- 
tracts you now? If it does not attract you now, 
what reason is there to suppose that it would 
under any circumstances attract you? If you do 
not want our Lord now the mere fact of your 
translation to heaven (were such a thing con- 
ceivable) would not alter you. Consider, that 
what you are and what you can enjoy in the world 
to come is the fulness of what you are and can 
enjoy now. Do you to-day want heaven? 

Let us pray to have understanding of the vision 
of our Lord. Pray, to desire heaven. 

Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that 
like as we do believe Thy only-begotten Son our 



THE INVITATION TO KNOWLEDGE 2\l 

Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the 
heavens ; so we may also in heart and mind thither 
ascend, and with him continually dwell, who liveth 
and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, one 
God, world without end. 

The Church teaches that certain men have been 
inspired by God the Holy Ghost, and that their 
writings contain a revelation of the will and pur- 
pose of God; it therefore has set these writings 
apart and called them Holy Scripture. In a way 
that is an artificial procedure; no doubt many 
other men have been inspired by God to teach; 
but the point about the Scriptures is that the 
Church guarantees to us their message — it adopts 
it and makes it its own. 

But it is not only needful that we should have 
an accredited message, it is necessary also that 
we should have an accredited interpretation of it. 
No Scripture is self -interpretative. What is the 
meaning of the revelation of the mind of God 
given in Scripture is gradually made clear to us 
through the experience of the Church. The un- 
derstanding and application of revelation is pro- 
gressive. The new experiences of the growing 
Church demanded from time to time authorita- 
tive statements of the meaning of the revelation 
committed to it. 

The process is not that to meet new needs new 



242 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

revelation is made, and declared by the voice of 
authority ; rather, as the Church lives by the truth 
it comes to see farther into the meaning of the 
truth given it, and draws out that meaning to meet 
contemporary needs. 

The great councils of the Church which have 
been called together from time to time to combat 
error have never claimed that they have dis- 
covered new truth; they claim to find in the old 
revelation the truth that applies to the present 
circumstances, and which had not been dwelt 
upon or formally stated because the questions 
which had now to be decided had not before 
arisen. 

It is claimed that the resources of the Church 
are sufficient to decide any and all questions which 
are vital to the faith without need of any other 
or further revelation than that which has been 
made to us in Holy Scripture. This revelation is 
studied from generation to generation by the doc- 
tors of the Church. Those great saints whom the 
Church recognises as doctors or accredited teach- 
ers are those who have been enabled under the 
divine guidance to express to the Church its own 
mind. In other words, they are the organs of the 
mind of the Church. 

However fully the Christian revelation has been 
stated there still remains the work of assimila- 



THE INVITATION TO KNOWLEDGE 243 

tion. Each generation has to be taught the 
revelation. Each generation, starting where its 
predecessor left off ought to get a little farther 
along in the work of living by the revelation. We 
have all the experience of the past to learn from. 
It is our work to enrich that experience before we 
hand it on. We look back sometimes with an 
unduly critical spirit at the deficiencies of the 
Church in the past; but if we are able to criticise 
the past with any justice it must be because the 
past has so taught us that we have advanced be- 
yond it. Let us so teach the future that it will 
be able to criticise us. 

Every vital spiritual experience aids in this 
work of expressing the meaning of revelation. 
It is the duty of the individual Christian, not only 
to know the truth, but to be made free by it. A 
truth that is merely intellectually grasped may be 
quite sterile ; to be of practical value it must pass 
into our lives as a mode of action. For all of us 
there is a door open in heaven and we are invited 
to come up, and pass in to the experience of the 
life of union. 

I want to insist on this individual appropria- 
tion of truth and contribution to experience. It 
is a means of the constant enrichment of the 
Christian consciousness as a whole. In any 
group of people working together for common 



244 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

ends there is no doubt that they act on one an- 
other in such wise that the energy of the group 
is greater than the sum of the energy of the indi- 
vidual members. So it is in a Christian group, 
in a congregation, for instance. So far as the 
members are working together on spiritual lines, 
earnestly attempting to live by the Gospel, they 
are undoubtedly aiding one another in the attempt. 
Any individual is enabled to live at a higher spirit- 
ual level because of the action of others on him, 
than he would be if he were alone. On the other 
hand those members of the group who are not 
making any true effort to realise their profession 
are holding back and dragging down those who 
are associated with them. 

The revelation of the mind of the Spirit which 
is the starting point of our individual effort is 
made to those who are " in Christ." There is 
our first step — that we be in him. Of course 
we are in him if we have kept the grace of our 
baptism or, having lost it, been restored through 
penitence. But we cannot really abide in him 
long as unfruitful branches. If we do not bring 
forth we shall be cast out from the union with 
the life of the vine. Our present work is to 
deepen this life of union. We are always tempted 
to think we need more knowledge. I feel quite 
certain that we all have more knowledge than we 



THE INVITATION TO KNOWLEDGE 245 

are using. We do not at present need more; 
what we need now is not greater insight, but 
closer union. Out of union will come vision, and 
out of vision will come the ability to deal with the 
daily details of conduct. 

What is needed is sympathy with the mind of 
Christ — his aim and work. What are the aims 
of Christ? This would seem to be among them : 
the production of a spiritual race; a race, that is 
to say, which puts spiritual development and ac- 
quirements before all else. It is only through 
the production of such a race that the Kingdom 
of God can be realised. So far we have only 
sporadic examples of the possibilities of the Life 
of the Gospel : these we call saints and admire 
them — from a distance. Until the saint becomes 
the normal product of our Church life we cannot 
be said to be making very much progress toward 
the Kingdom of God. That Kingdom is a society 
in which the mind of Christ is reflected and is a 
primary aim of Christ. 

Are you in sympathy with that ? Yes, you say ; 
but are you ? Just think what it means — the 
dominance of spiritual motive in you, the activi- 
ties of life chosen and governed from the spiritual 
point of view. Is that really your case? Have 
you, as matter of fact, expelled worldly motive 
from your life? Are you expending life's re- 



246 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

sources with reference to their effect on the ad- 
vancement of the Kingdom of God? What is 
the account of your social life? What do you 
give time to? What sort of people do you enter- 
tain? Would you think of excluding from your 
acquaintance those who are " everywhere re- 
ceived," because of their moral laxity? 

You have not gone high enough till you are 
ready to count all things well lost so that you may 
win Christ. You have not gone far enough till 
you are ready to suffer for Christ — till you are 
ready to bear the reproach of Christ — which as 
things are at present is often being thought 
" narrow." 

What have you actually lost on the way of 
ascent toward a better knowledge of Christ? 
That is one way of estimating the progress of life 
— by the flying milestones. What have you left 
behind ? Very much ? 

Beginners on the Ascent are apt to be much 
occupied with " difficulties " whether of thought 
or practice. The best way of treating difficulties 
is to outgrow them. If we hold fast to the spirit- 
ual activities of religion it is wonderful to find 
how quickly the things that troubled and per- 
plexed are left behind. The difficulties are solved 
by walking. An intense spiritual experience of 
our Lord is a sufficient answer to all the theoreti- 



THE INVITATION TO KNOWLEDGE 247 

cal objections which can be raised against Chris- 
tianity. The practice of religion clears the theory 
of religion. 

If we do not try to remove the difficulties but 
give ourselves to know Christ the truth of Christ 
and his relation to us will be revealed to us as we 
can receive it. And it will so come as a whole 
experience, which can expand no doubt, but is 
intelligible as far as it goes. Proceeding in any 
other way, whatever of truth we get comes in 
pieces, not very clearly related to each other. 

One of the things we soon learn by this method 
of approach is the meaning and value of sacra- 
ments. We do not stop to have an unimpeachable 
theory of the sacraments, we aim through prac- 
tice to learn what the sacraments can do. And 
we speedily find that they are doors which open 
and admit us to the divine Presence. It is more 
or less difficult to find Jesus at the end of an 
argument; we find him easily in the Eucharist. 

When we see Jesus revealed to us, we see all 
things in him. 

No more veil ! God bids me enter 

By the new and living way — 
Not in trembling hope I venture, 

Boldly I His call obey; 
There, with Him, my God, I meet 
God upon the mercy-seat ! 



248 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

In the robes of spotless whiteness, 
With the Blood of priceless worth, 

He has gone into that brightness, 
Christ rejected from the earth — 

Christ accepted there on high, 

And in Him do I draw nigh. 

Oh, the welcome I have found there, 
God in all his love made known ! 

Oh, the glory that surrounds there 
Those accepted in His Son! 

Who can tell the depths of bliss 

Spoken by the Father's kiss ? 

Place of glory, place of blessing, 
Place where God His heart displays, 

All in Thee, O Christ, possessing, 

Thine the voice that leads our praise; 

Thine the new eternal song, 

Through the ages borne along 

As within His Temple olden, 
There was seen no costly stone, 

Nought but cedar, carved and golden, 
Nought but Christ, and Christ alone — 

So the stones so dearly bought, 

God in heaven beholds them not. 

All the worth I have before Him 
Is the value of the Blood; 



THE INVITATION TO KNOWLEDGE 249 

I present when I adore Him, 

Christ, the First-fruits, unto God. 
Him with joy doth God behol 
Thus is my acceptance told. 



XVIII 

THE INVITATION OF THE 

FELLOW-WORKERS 

Revelation, XXII, if 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord: 

And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And 
let him that heareth, say, Come. And let him 
that is athirst Come. And whosoever will, let 
him take of the water of life freely 

Let us picture, 

HEAVEN, as it is shown us in the final pages 
of the Revelation of S. John. It is still in 
terms of beauty that it is placed before us. We 
feel as we read such books as the later chapters of 
Isaiah and the Revelation of S. John that the neg- 
lect of the sense of beauty is the neglect of one 
of the instruments God has given us wherewith to 
know him. It is not only the roads of truth and 
goodness that meet before the Throne of God, but 
the road of beauty joins them there ; and it is so 
exhilarating to travel along that road that we love 
to join S. John on it. Through his eyes we catch 

250 



INVITATION OF THE FELLOW-WORKERS 25 1 

the flash of " the river of the water of life, clear 
as crystal, proceeding out of the Throne of God 
and of the Lamb." We seem to walk down the 
street by the riverside under the grateful shade 
of the trees of life. There we have no morning 
nor evening, no alternation of light and dark, but 
the perfect light that the Lord God giveth. In 
that light they who dwell in the City have the 
vision of the supreme beauty — "They shall see 
his Face." " And I, John, saw these things and 
heard them; " and as he listens, there comes the 
note of urgency: " Behold, I come quickly; and 
my reward is with me, to give to every man ac- 
cording as his work shall be." When the gates 
swing open and the trumpet sounds and the sum- 
mons goes forth, there will, it seems, be found 
those who are incompetent for the City's life. It 
is only " they that do his commandments " who 
" have right to the tree of life, and may enter in 
through the gates into the City." The gates 
close, and the sound of weeping and gnashing of 
teeth reaches us — the lamentation of the " dogs, 
and the sorcerers, and fornicators and murderers, 
and idolaters, and whoso loveth and maketh a lie." 
who are without. We see our Lord sending S. 
John to the Churches to proclaim the message and 
to give the invitation : " And the Spirit and the 
Bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, 



252 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Come. And let him that is athirst come. And 
whosoever will, let him take of the water of life 
freely." S. John, when he has come back from 
his visions of the heavenly world, must have 
come with a sense of pressure on him to make 
men come, to make them understand the message. 
Picture S. John, in his church at Ephesus, pro- 
claiming the Gospel-summons to repentance. 
With what conviction and force he must have 
spoken! With what an intense feeling of the 
awfulness of his message ! He, John, had known 
and seen so much! And then look out into the 
streets of Ephesus and see the idle, pleasure-seek- 
ing crowd float by, contemptuous of the voice of 
this prophet, heedless of his message, not even 
thinking it worth while to pause long enough to 
find what it is about! Think of the experiences 
of S. John's life and of all that he had to tell men, 
of which we get a little in the Gospel and the 
Revelation, and then think of how few in actual 
numbers his converts would have been! 

Consider, first, 

How often we hear it said that the Christian 
pictures of heaven are unattractive! But if by 
pictures of heaven it is meant heaven as it is de- 
picted by S. John, it can only be unattractive be- 
cause the ideal elements of the spiritual life, the 



INVITATION OF THE FELLOW-WORKERS 253 

worship and service of God and the society of the 
saints, do not appeal. Indeed, S. John's visions 
of the heavenly life would seem to be a distinct 
challenge to our ideals. The fact is that we form 
ideals based on the passions and appetites of our 
nature and derdand that they shall be fulfilled in 
the future, or we have no use for the future : but 
in fact it is the future which should control the 
formation of our ideals. We look forward in 
life and act in reference to what the future will 
probably contain. Why stop with this life? 
The very value of such a book as the Revelations 
is that it gives us sufficient knowledge of the 
future to control our ideals. If we believe it at 
all, we have ascertained the fact that certain char- 
acter-qualities are of permanent value and others 
are not. As wise master builders we are en- 
abled to shape life with reference to its final de- 
velopment. It would certainly be of great value 
to us in this world if we could know what would 
be the situation of the child we are undertaking 
to train, fifty years hence. There would be a cer- 
tainty and a precision of detail in our training 
that there could not be otherwise. But we do 
know what will be the situation of the saved soul 
in the eternal world, and therefore we can shape 
character in accordance with this knowledge. 
There may be great hesitancy as to the secular 



254 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

training of the child ; there need be none as to his 
spiritual training. The sort of character he must 
possess is known and the methods of its acquisi- 
tion are known; and likewise the urgency of the 
work is known. " Behold, I come quickly " is 
the message to every man. The Gospel Pilgrim 
stands with girt loins and lighted lamp, waiting 
for the coming of the Master. He has no un- 
certainty about what he ought to do or be. His 
only uncertainty is when his personal summons to 
the Presence will come ; in any case he knows that 
he must be always ready, whether at even or in 
the morning or at cock-crow, lest the Master, 
coming suddenly, shall find him sleeping. Con- 
sider our Lord's ideal of his disciple, as of one 
always ready, always with his work done, each 
day's labor accomplished when the night falls and 
he turns to his rest in the expectation of another 
day. In such a case it will not matter whether 
another day comes : or if instead the day that 
breaks be the morning of the Resurrection. 

Consider, second, 

Whether you have this sense of readiness? 
Whether in any sense you can be said to be wait- 
ing for the divine call ? I think we can be said to 
be ready for the coming of Christ if in this life 
we have actually been working with Christ ; if our 



INVITATION OF THE FELLOW-WORKERS 255 

life's work has been, not simply operation but co- 
operation. " The Spirit and the Bride say, 
Come." They are not calling us from a far dis- 
tance to traverse the space that lies between; but 
they are with us, holding our hands and leading 
us on. Christ " trode the wine-press alone," but 
we do not have to. He came to our aid, and " in 
all our affliction he was afflicted." The central 
wonder of the spiritual life as it unfolds to our 
advancing experience is the help we find by the 
way. At every moment we find that we can fall 
back on the help and guidance of the Holy Spirit. 
Our one risk of failure is in our separation from 
the mind of Christ to follow our own inclinations 
and to linger, fascinated, by the sights of the way, 
rather than to press on to the City of our destina- 
tion. Consider, not only whether you have some 
ideal of a life reaching its consummation in the 
life of the City, but whether you have any sense of 
the pressing urgency of the vocation that is yours. 
" Remember Lot's wife." There are those who 
waste their time in dalliance with the world till 
their lamps go out, and the Bridegroom comes — 
and passes. While it is called to-day, is our voca- 
tion : when it shall be tomorrow the door will be 
shut, and we shut out with the lost crowd that 
knocks in vain at the gate. While it is called to- 
day hear what the Spirit saith to the Churches. 



256 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

The danger of an unspiritual life is not to be read 
in what we can see of its effects but must be in- 
ferred from what our Lord does to rescue us 
from it. It may well seem that the life of the 
world is only passing foolishness and unwitting 
mistake until we see cast athwart it the shadow of 
the Cross, on which Jesus is dying for it. If it 
cost so much to redeem our souls then the way in 
which we treat our Lord can be no light matter. 
If the Spirit and the Bride are urgent in their 
invitation it must be because there is need of 
haste ere the night fall and the gates be closed. 
Consider, whether you are hasting on to the 
Presence, eager to pass through the gates into the 
City ere the night fall. 

Let us pray, 

That the Visions of S. John may grow in sig- 
nificance for you. Pray that you may increase 
in desire for the Beatific Vision. 

O God who hast prepared for those who love 
Thee such good things as pass man's understand- 
ing, pour into our hearts such love of thee, that 
we, loving thee above all things, may attain thy 
gracious promises which exceed all that we can 
desire; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

As the vision of S. John draws near its end 
the City is revealed in all its splendor. The 



INVITATION OF THE FELLOW-WORKERS 257 

urgency of the invitation grows more insistent. 
Our Lord joins others with himself in his invita- 
tion. Added to his voice are the voices of the 
Spirit and of the Bride which is the Church. Let 
us dwell on the significance of these added names. 

It is the Holy Spirit who carries out the work 
of the Kingdom of the Incarnation. He is our 
Lord's Vicar and is sent from him. The temporal 
mission of the Holy Ghost is the mission of taking 
of the things of Christ and showing them unto us. 

He is the converting Spirit. He is all the time 
dealing with our wills that they may be converted 
and made one with the will of God. The will that 
is converted he constantly strengthens. The 
mind that is doubtful he directs. " The Spirit 
also helpeth our infirmities : for we know not 
what we should pray for as we ought: but the 
Spirit himself maketh intercessions for us with 
groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that 
searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of 
the Spirit, that he maketh intercession for the 
saints according to the will of God." 

They who are spiritual, that is, those who set 
spiritual things first in the out-working of their 
lives, understand what is the mind of the Spirit 
and are able to " judge all things " ; that is, they 
have an educated and illumined conscience and 
without difficulty take the same point of view in 



258 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

regard to the possibilities and obligations of life 
as the Spirit. One of the outstanding phenomena 
of the life of sanctity is its certainty of judgment 
in the face of any trial or temptation where a 
rapid decision is to be made. They have the 
Mind of the Spirit. 

It is the influence of the Spirit in the soul that 
wins us to the appreciation of spiritual ideals — 
to perceive their beauty and attractiveness. As 
we look back over a life of increasing spiritual 
attainment we are impressed by the fact that the 
beauty of the Spiritual Life has been gradually 
revealed to us, and as it has been revealed, we 
have been weaned from the life of worldliness. 
We were won with some difficulty from this or 
that attachment to the world ; now as we look back 
we wonder how we could have been so attracted. 
The path we have travelled measures the power 
of the Spirit in our lives. If we are still hesi- 
tating and clinging to the world it is because we 
have not surrendered ourselves to the Spirit. It 
means that we are still subject to the " will of the 
flesh." That is the fortress of the power of dark- 
ness that is contending with the power of the 
Spirit for our souls. The process of passing from 
the one to the other is described as dying. Death 
is detachment from environment, the ceasing to 
respond to its stimuli. But this detachment from 



INVITATION OF THE FELLOW-WORKERS 259 

the environment of the world, if it is contained 
in the process of conversion, is coincident with a 
spiritual resurrection, that is, a becoming con- 
sciousness of a new and spiritual environment; 
" living unto God " is the consciousness of the 
spiritual. 

The passage from the lower to the higher, from 
death to life, from the natural to the spiritual, is 
through the higher stooping to take the lower. 
So our Lord stooped in the Incarnation, and made 
the spiritual life possible. So through the Spirit 
he still stoops and assumes us, takes us, that is, 
into his Incarnate Life. 

In a certain limited way the change that is 
wrought in us by the action of the Spirit is ex- 
pressed by a change in interests. If you are in- 
terested mainly in the world and what it can give 
you, you are not living the life of the converted. 
The urge of the spiritual life we express by the 
word attraction. What are we being drawn to? 
S. Paul sets the pattern : " Whatsoever things 
are true, whatsoever things are honorable, what- 
soever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, 
whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things 
are of good report; if there be any virtue, if there 
be any praise; think on these things." We grow 
like that with which we closely associate ourselves. 
The arousing of desire is the work of the Spirit 



20O THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

in us. We offer to the child what we want him 
to learn to value. 

When once the attraction has been felt, we must 
go on to deeper study of the objects presented, to 
find the secret of their attractiveness. The draw- 
ing power of spiritual objects is limitless. 

One of the obstacles that we find constantly in 
the development of our spiritual life is what I may 
call the danger of lapse of attention. Continuity 
of effort we find very difficult. We are roused to 
a momentary enthusiasm again and again, and 
under the impulse of it we make resolutions, only 
to find after a little that we have permitted our 
attention to wander and the resolutions have come 
to nothing. How many times have we resolved 
to make ourselves more familiar with our Bibles, 
to read fewer novels, and more of the rich liter- 
ature of devotion ! We have determined to over- 
come our dependence on other people and other 
things for occupation and interest, and to seek 
quiet and silence rather than avoid them, that we 
may give ourselves to the development of our 
spiritual nature. 

It is the constant occupation of our minds with 
exterior things which prevents us from paying 
needed attention to those thoughts and desires 
which from time to time arise in the soul and fill 
it with a sense of longing to know and love God 



INVITATION OF THE FELLOW-WORKERS 26l 

better. But while this desire seems at the time 
to be a perfectly honest and sincere desire, it 
turns out in the sequel that we have not time to 
give to God. We are busy and troubled about 
many things — but they are not the things that 
make for our everlasting peace ! 

But those deep movements of our inner life 
which from time to time trouble our self-satis- 
faction and placidity are in reality attempts of the 
Spirit to express himself, to make himself heard 
amid the noise of outer things. The momentary 
drawing toward the ideals of meditation and 
prayer which we speedily declare are impossible 
in so busy a life as ours, are his voice trying to 
extend an invitation — Come. Come, he says, to 
these joys of the spiritual life, of the life of 
communion with your Redeemer; come to those 
joys which are so delicate, so illusive that you 
may easily miss them. So he pleads, so he tries 
to awake in us the hunger for the heavenly 
treasures. What has been our response? 

The Bride too says, Come. 

The voice of the Church reaches us in many 
ways, and our modern temptation is still the temp- 
tation of the men of Judea — "Is not this the 
carpenter's Son?" Because the voice of the 
divine invitation comes to us through the human 
instrument, we concern ourselves with the familiar 



262 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

and imperfect instrument and decline even to con- 
sider that it may be the medium of the more-than- 
human. 

The voice of the Bride is the voice of an au- 
thoritative teacher. The Church has a message 
from God. The world only cares for messages 
that it can revise from time to time, and resents 
a message that claims to control belief and con- 
duct under all the changing conditions of human 
society. The religion the Church offers to us is a 
revealed religion. The things concerning life and 
the world that we can find out for ourselves God 
seems to leave us to find when we get ready. The 
necessity of revealing religion is because its funda- 
mental postulates are things which man cannot 
find out for himself, and can only know if he be 
told. And he can only be told by authority, and 
the truths so told are eternal and not to be revised 
from time to time. 

They concern chiefly God and our relation to 
God. If we were seeking the shortest possible 
summary of them we should say that they are 
concerned with the life of prayer — using prayer 
in its widest possible meaning. The call of the 
Church is a call to exercise the powers of our 
inner being — our spiritual faculties ; the ordinary 
prayer of the Christian, of course; but also the 
more advanced forms of prayer — such prayer 



INVITATION OF THE FELLOW-WORKERS 263 

as is exercised in conscious union with our Lord 
that we may enter more fully into his mind and 
become more completely conformed to his will. 
The path of prayer leads finally to the sacrificial 
prayer when we pray in union with the one true, 
eternal Sacrifice for sins. 

Who can resist these voices — the Bride, the 
Spirit, Christ ? No one need resist them. Who- 
soever will, let him come. Let him come to the 
water of life. One would think the way thither 
would be crowded — but it never has been. 
What you who read are concerned with is that 
to-day it shall see the passage of one pilgrim, 
even if alone. 

Wanderer, rest thy weary feet ; 

Shapes and sounds forgotten now — 
Close thine eyes in stillness sweet, 
With thy God alone art thou. 
In the deeps of silence rest, 
Let him work his high behest. 

Silence ! reasonings hard and keen, 

Still — O longings sad and deep — 
Waken to the morn serene, 

Tangled dreams depart with sleep; 
In the calm eternal day 
Night's wild visions pass away. 



264 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

In the silence of that dawn 

God shall speak his words of grace, 
Light that round thy waking shone 
Is the radiance of his Face ; 
Yearning of his heart to thee, 
Fills the deep immensity. 

Gently loosens he thy hold 

Of the treasured former things — 
Loves and joys that were of old, 

Shapes to which the spirit clings — 
And alone, alone he stands, 
Stretching forth beseeching hands. 

Lo, the soul thy love has bought, 
Through the ages, Lord, am I, 
Knowing nought, and willing nought, 
Thine alone eternally — 

Thine, the Bride thy love has won, 
Gift of God to Christ his Son. 

In thy strength my soul is still 

Clay within the potter's hands, 
Moulded by thy tender will 
Mightier than all commands ; 

Shaped and moved by thee alone, 
Now, and evermore thine own. 1 

x Tcr Steegen. 



XIX 

THE WELCOME 
S. Matt. XXV, 34 

Let us listen to the words of Our Lord: 

Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the king- 
dom prepared for you from the foundation of the 
world. 

Let us picture, 

CHE nations gathered for judgment before 
our blessed Lord. " The judgment is set 
and the books are opened." Try to see our Lord 
in his glory; no longer as at his first coming, in 
humiliation, surrounded by the hosts of the holy 
Angels. Try to see yourself somewhere in this 
multitude, waiting to be judged. Think how you 
will feel. You will really know what the result 
of the judgment is going to be in your case by the 
way in which you feel toward the Judge. If you 
are looking on the glory of his Face with love and 
adoration, you will be safe. Look once more at 
the field where the nations are being marshalled 
265 



266 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

by the Angels. See them falling into their places 
and being ranged, rank on rank, on the right and 
left of the Judge. Perhaps you will not be so 
terrified or so self-centered but that you will look 
about you for faces you will recognise. Then 
will come the silence, while all await the sentence. 
From your place you hear the King saying: 
" Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the 
kingdom prepared for you from the foundation 
of the world." Will your heart leap for joy as 
you hear those words ? Will you recognise your- 
self in the picture that our Lord draws of those 
who are blessed of the Father? Or will you be 
standing disconsolate on the left hand, as these 
troop away to the life eternal? Remember, that 
there are many things which God commands that 
we may disregard. There are many obligations 
that we may leave unfulfilled. We may impa- 
tiently shake off control and disdain God's com- 
mandments. But the time during which this is 
possible comes to an end, and the day dawns when 
we shall stand before the judgment seat of 
Christ. We may be feverish in the pursuit of 
self -gratification while it is daylight; but the 
night cometh. We cannot put off the hour of 
the Judgment. 

O day of wrath ! O day of mourning! 



THE WELCOME 267 

See fulfill'd the prophets' warning, 
Heav'n and earth in ashes burning ! 

O what fear man's bosom rendeth, 
When from heaven the Judge descendeth, 
On whose sentence all dependeth. 

Look once more on the face of the Judge. It is 
the Face of One who died for you upon the Cross. 
It is the Face of One who has followed you all 
your life with the offer of his mercy. It is a 
Face that ought to have become familiar, because 
you have seen it looking out of all the duties of 
your life. If it is a Face that you have learned 
to love, then the Judgment will be like the break- 
ing of a child's dream when he opens his eyes and 
sees the face of his mother bending over him. 
There is no fear to him that is in Christ Jesus be- 
cause nothing can separate him from his love. 
" Neither death nor life . . . nor any other crea- 
ture, shall be able to separate us from the love of 
God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." " They 
shall see his Face." 

Consider, first, 

On what this judgment is based. The nations 
are judged by their relation to our Lord as they 
have found him manifested in his members. 
They have not had to ascend into heaven to bring 



268 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

him down from above, but they have found him 
nigh them, manifested in the life of his kingdom. 
We have given to us a picture which seems 
almost a photograph of these days in which we 
live : men shouting, " He is in the desert ! " and 
others crying, " He is in the secret chamber ! " 
Perplexed people whispering, " lo ! here, or lo ! 
there." And always he is going silently among 
us, known to those who have eyes to see and ears 
to hear and hearts to understand. It is a matter 
of spiritual insight. There are those who deny 
to life any spiritual value; there are those who 
without denying merely go their way as those in 
the days of Noah. But he that is spiritually alert 
will see Christ everywhere offering himself for 
our acceptance. He will find him in the Secret 
Chamber where he pours out his heart's need 
at his nail-pierced Feet,; he will find him in the 
Desert of the World, in spiritually Dry Places, 
where " men's talk is of oxen " and their thoughts 
far from the hidden Lord. When man goes 
forth to his labor he will find him in the field, 
beside the forge, by the desk or in the market. 
When he returns weary at the fall of night, he 
will find him beside his door. He will see his 
Face looking out of other faces, and will under- 
stand that the ministry to the brother is ministry 
to him. He does not have to be told : " Inas- 



THE WELCOME 269 

much as you have done it unto one of the least 
of these my brethren, you have done it unto me." 
Consider, that there is small need to be blinded 
in these matters. We have been sufficiently 
taught that our Lord, so far from leaving us, 
has gathered us into the unity of his Body, and 
is manifesting himself through us to our brethren 
and through our brethren to us. There is small 
need for anyone who has grasped the outermost 
fringes of Christ's teaching to blunder concern- 
ing the values of life. Spiritual facts and ma- 
terial facts almost classify themselves; and the 
surprise of those who at the judgment find them- 
selves on the left hand can only be the outcome 
of a selfishness which shuts its eyes and ears to 
all the pleading of the Crucified because self- 
gratification is the only thing it has ever valued. 
There ought to be no surprise at the sight of the 
Materialist " going away into everlasting pun- 
ishment;" it is impossible to conceive any other 
end for those who have no hope and are without 
God in the world. 

Consider, second, 

Whether you are thinking with any seriousness 
of your life as a preparation for the judgment. 
That we may be adequately prepared for the 
judgment there must be a careful seeking to 



27O THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

know the will of God. People think that their 
conscience is a sufficient guide in these high mat- 
ters. But that is not so ; it is quite easy to have 
an ignorant or an ill-informed conscience. Con- 
science is only a safe guide when we have done 
all that we can to instruct it. We can hardly 
rely on good intentions, or on " our heart being 
in the right place " as the ground of our accept- 
ance at the judgment, after a life of careless 
laxity or indifference to spiritual truth. The 
education of the conscience is a very serious mat- 
ter, and the true ground of education is found 
in our association with our blessed Lord. He 
has made it possible for us to understand his 
teaching and to enter upon the practice of it 
by virtue of the illuminating presence of the 
Holy Spirit whom he has given us. Our ap- 
preciation of the meaning of our Lord's life, 
that is to say, is not solely a matter of intellectual 
acumen, but it comes from the supernatural en- 
lightenment imparted to us by the Spirit. That 
we humbly seek to know and interpose no ob- 
stacles of sin and self-will is our own contribu- 
tion to the appreciation of the truth. And when 
we know the truth, the truth makes us free; 
frees us, that is, from the bondage of sin and 
ignorance, into the blessed liberty of the children 
of God. This practice of the will of our Lord 



THE WELCOME 2JI 

is really living with him ; living so ciosely to him, 
so fully in his mind, that we reflect his thought 
and action. Consider, whether as you look 
back on your past you find there a growing com- 
prehension of this mind of our Lord? Is your 
conscience growing clearer so that you have fewer 
hesitations in the decisions you are called to 
make? Are you acquiring an habitual insight 
into spiritual values which is almost instinctive? 
Do you experience a growing delight in discover- 
ing the will of God? Is there less opposition or 
disappointment when you find that God's will 
crosses your will? Are you less liable to find 
excuses for yourself? If your discovery of our 
Lord's will for you is as the discovery of a great 
and priceless treasure to gain which you gladly 
sell all that you may possess, then indeed you can 
look on with eagerness to the time when you shall 
stand at the judgment, because you are sure that 
the unveiling of our Lord there will be for you 
the discovery of the Face of a Friend, 

Let us pray, 

For the guidance of the Holy Spirit speaking 
through the conscience, that we may be ready for 
the Coming of our Lord. 

O God, who didst teach the hearts of thy faith- 
ful people by sending to them the light of thy 



2^2 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Holy Spirit; grant us by the same Spirit a right 
judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice 
in his holy comfort; through the merits of Christ 
Jesus our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with 
thee, in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, 
world without end. 

The result of our Lord's invitations is a di- 
vision among those who are called — a division 
that does not always show itself in this life but 
which must show at the day of judgment. Be 
clear that the division represents not the divine 
purpose for man, but a human choice, rejecting 
the divine purpose. 

The ultimate account of those who do not re- 
spond, I suppose, must be that they find nothing 
that seems to them desirable in Christ and his 
Gospel. He is despised of them and rejected. 
We have only to call to mind the utter contempt 
with which Christian ideals are spoken of in a 
large section of modern literature — the section 
that is most popular with the youth of America 
to-day. In the place of the ideals of the Christ- 
life we have set out conceptions of " freedom," 
" self-determination," " living one's own life." 
What to-day is found most hateful in the Gospel is 
that it demands restraint and control. 

In our Lord's parable of the Judgment the 
line of division is determined by attitude toward 



THE WELCOME 273 

Christ. To the protests of those on the left 
hand that they had not at all seen Christ as he 
offered himself, the answer is that they had seen 
the brother, and that they should have perceived 
Christ in him. Christ took upon himself our 
humanity precisely that he might present him- 
self to us through it. Wherever there is the 
brother in need there is Christ in the brother 
pleading for our love and ministry. To the man 
who has not yet found Christ the readiest path 
of access is through ministry to the brother. 
Those who minister to him are on their way to 
find the Elder Brother the meaning of whose 
life on earth was service. " I am among you 
as he that serveth," he pointed out to those who 
had gone astray in their notion of greatness. 

And finding him, and Christ through him, they 
would have found blessedness. The condition of 
blessedness is that we be in realised relation to 
our Lord. The Sermon on the Mount declares 
the nature of this blessedness : it is the acquisi- 
tion of the supernatural virtues to which the 
natural virtues lead up. It is too often true that 
we are content with the natural virtues and de- 
cline to go on. 

In the Sermon on the Mount the qualities are 
stated as attributes of character. They are 
humility and meekness and the rest. Here the 



274 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

conditions of acceptance are stated in terms of 
fruits, that is, as the works of mercy. I suppose 
it is the same* thing viewed from another angle. 
If we have the character of the Sermon on the 
Mount we shall abound in good works; if we 
abound in good works, it will be because we have 
the character of the Sermon on the Mount — 
whether we have realised it or no. 

To think of good works as having merit is an 
altogether superficial way of looking at them. 
They are the evidences of our interior life. They 
spring out of love. They are the proof of our 
union with our blessed Lord. We do not pro- 
duce with a view to the accumulation of merit 
or to attaining a reward; we produce because 
Christ is living in us and working in us. The 
good work is the work of the indwelling Lord. 

The stingy Christian, the Christian who is seek- 
ing the minimum of obligation, gives evidence of 
the superficiality of his Christianity. His care- 
ful withholding is evidence that his religion is 
unreal and has no title to be classified as a fol- 
lowing of him who gave all to the very Cross that 
we might live. 

The direct evidence of the unreality of the 
Christian profession of a vast number of Chris- 
tians to-day is the meagerness of their giving; 
even their money-giving, to put it on the lowest 



THE WELCOME 275 

grounds. When you compare the voluntary ex- 
penditure on pleasure and luxury of the ordi- 
nary congregation with its support of the works 
of the Church, you see at once that these people 
do not mean what they say when they profess to 
be the followers of a Master who had not where 
to lay his head. A Jew gave a tenth of his in- 
come to God — what ought a Christian to give ? 

The result of living for God, of complete con- 
secration to God, is the attainment of blessed- 
ness. " Come, ye blessed of my Father," is the 
welcome that greets such. 

The blessedness of heaven is not that we have 
at length received the reward of well-doing. It 
is hardly true to think of heaven (I am afraid 
it is rather a common thought) as the place where 
what we have been deprived of here is made 
good, and what we have suffered here is recom- 
pensed. If we have served God truly here we 
have received what we wanted, the sense of the 
divine presence and approval. The only blessed- 
ness we want here or elsewhere is the blessedness 
of being in harmony with God. What the proba- 
tion of a Christian means is that there is a grow- 
ing harmony. What heaven means is that this 
process has reached its final stage. The temporal 
through which we struggled with much toil and 
difficulty, often perplexed and confused, has at 



276 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

length passed away, and the spiritual has been 
perfectly acquired. We no longer see through 
the mirror, in the enigma, but face to face. And 
in the seeing, we know that our life is justified. 
We do not want anything more than the love of 
God that this reveals. 

The acceptance of God here in such ways as 
he reveals himself to us is the beginning of the 
life of blessedness. We enter on the pursuit of 
the best we know. The result of this is the ex- 
pulsion of the undesirable elements of character 
in the only way in which they can be per- 
manently expelled, by the extrusive power of 
virtue. The growth of the virtues makes the 
existence of the vices impossible. The expan- 
sion of the Christ-like character is a process of 
purification. 

This process of growth is described as a put- 
ting on of Christ. I suppose that that will mean 
the increasing appropriation of the qualities of 
his life. This looks like a very difficult task if 
we allow ourselves to stand outside, as it were, 
and think of it as a mechanical process, achieved 
with effort. But the way of achievement is love. 
If we truly love any quality of the Christ-char- 
acter we shall acquire it without much difficulty. 
Love makes all things easy. We only think of the 
spiritual life as great labor while we are look- 



THE WELCOME 2.77 

ing at it from a distance ; when we love it and run 
to it, the difficulty passes in great measure. 

It is always a mistake to think of ourselves and 
our efforts as accomplishing anything that is 
spiritual. We do and can do nothing alone; we 
do and can do all things through Christ who 
strengthens us. The first step is to realise that 
we are indeed in Christ, that he is personally in- 
terested in us. So long as we think of him as 
a Judge looking on with a critical mind at the 
ineffectiveness of our attempts to follow him, 
we shall never make much progress; when we 
learn to think of him as the Friend at the side who 
is helping and supporting, always sympathetic 
and loving, we are stimulated to go on. 

And the final revelation that he makes of him- 
self will be but the crown and consummation of 
the process that has been going on. We are 
growing up into him, and the result will be to 
find ourselves permanently in him and perfectly 
knowing him. 

It is a process that extends out beyond this 
world. It goes on " until the day of Jesus 
Christ " — and, no doubt, beyond. It is a process 
that is not checked by death — rather death will 
translate us to more favorable surroundings for 
growth. But it must at least begin, in some way 
that is a real beginning, here 



278 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Christ reveals himself to us here, and he re- 
veals himself at any time as far as he can. There 
is nothing on his side that blocks a further revela- 
tion. He wants to make himself known. 

Do we want to know? Is there a real eager- 
ness for spiritual accomplishment? If there had 
been in the past would you not be much farther 
along than you are to-day? Try to understand 
how much you have held back and frustrated the 
work of our blessed Lord. He has been say- 
ing, " Come," a good many years now, and you 
have come — how far? 

Why have we not more eagnerness ? We do not 
know, it is said ; but why do we not know ? We 
often seem like men groping about in a dark room 
neglecting to turn on the light. 

For we can have all the light we want — light 
to see him. And always we shall see him in the 
same attitude of invitation, eager that we should 
come nearer to him. We seem to see him with 
hands stretched out, full of blessing. " Come, 
inherit the Kingdom prepared for you." That 
is so wonderful ! 

Draw me to thee, till far within thy rest, 
In stillness of thy peace, thy voice I hear — 

For ever quieted upon thy breast, 
So loved, so near. 

By mystery of thy touch my spirit thrilled, 



THE WELCOME 279 

Magnet all Divine ; 

The hunger of my soul for ever stilled, 

For thou art mine. 
For me, O Lord, the world is all too small, 

For I have seen thy face, 
Where thy eternal love irradiates all 

Within thy secret place. 
And therefore from all others, from all else, 

Draw thou my soul to thee — - 
Yea — thou hast broken the enchanter's spells, 

And I am free. 
Now in the haven of untroubled rest 

1 land at last, 

The hunger, and the thirst, and weary quest, 

For ever past. 
There, Lord, to lose, in bliss of thy embrace 

The recreant will; 
There, in the radiance of thy blessed face, 

Be hushed and still; 
There, speechless at thy pierced Feet 

See none and nought beside, 
And know but this — that thou art sweet, 

That I am satisfied. 1 

iTer Steegen. 



XX 

OUR INVITATION TO JESUS 
Revelation XXII, 20 

Let us listen to the words of S. John: 

He which testifieth these things saith, Surely, I 
come quickly. Amen. Even so come, Lord 
Jesus. 

Let us picture, 

i^HE last years of S. John. All the com- 
^^X panions who with him had sat at our 
Lord's feet and heard his teaching are long dead. 
But the memories of the days that are gone are 
not dead. We feel that the passing years would 
have laid no obliterating hand on the memory of 
John the Beloved. The figure of our Lord and 
all that he said and did in the time of the ministry 
would remain clear because our Lord did not 
tend to become a thought out of the past but 
continued a present friend. Because he had ex- 
perience of our Lord each day, now the memory 
of the days he had spent with him would remain 

280 



OUR INVITATION TO JESUS 28l 

vivid. I like to think of S. John in his old age 
recalling the scenes and the words of the time 
when he walked by the side of Jesus — that 
wonderful day when the call came and he left 
all to follow, that was when he made the choice 
which no one who makes ever regrets. How 
often would the night-scene in the Upper Room 
come to him, where he had leaned on Jesus' 
breast and heard the grave voice giving the last 
charge — never could that night grow dim in any 
of its details. Or that morning when, outrun- 
ning Peter, he came first to the sepulchre, and yet 
went not in. Perhaps that would always remain 
a puzzle to him — why he stood hesitating at the 
entrance of the tomb till Peter pushed by him. 
So as he sits by the church in Ephesus visions 
of the past come crowding and, it may be, mingle 
with those other nearer visions, when a door be- 
ing opened in heaven he looked in and saw the 
Throne and the Living Creatures and the Elders, 
and heard the song of Moses and the Lamb and 
the music of the Harpers harping with their 
harps. So much of all that he had seen and 
heard would come back to him as he stood at the 
altar and repeated the sacramental words which 
made his altar in Ephesus one with the altar in 
heaven because the One Sacrifice was being of- 
fered on each! And we are glad, as we recall 



282 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

these things, to have the little glimpses that the 
tradition of the Church gives us of the old man, 
thoughtful and kind, — with a flash of the old 
temper when he learns of the loss of the boy- 
he had trusted to another, — seated among the 
disciples who gather lovingly about him, and 
summing up all his teaching in the one sentence : 
" Children, love one another." Try and see the 
man whose experiences were wider and deeper 
than any other of the sons of men summing them 
all up in the one word love. That is the sum, is 
it not? for, " God is Love." 

Consider, first, 

How the years still draw out and our Lord 
does not come! We look back across the cen- 
turies and see the varied fortunes of the Church 
and our heart fails us. There at the beginning 
was Bethlehem and Nazareth and the years of 
teaching; then Calvary and Joseph's Garden and 
the Resurrection. The young life of the Church 
flows out from these, so vigorous, so eager, meet- 
ing the test of its martyr-years so wonderfully! 
But almost from the beginning the picture be- 
comes blurred. Already, this John the Theolo- 
gian, bringing the messages of the risen Jesus to 
the seven Churches, brings blame and bitter re- 
proach for their faithlessness. Darker grow the 



OUR INVITATION TO JESUS 283 

shadows as the stream of the centuries flows by. 
The world which S. John renounced with such 
sweeping denial sits by the side of a fascinated 
Church and laughs! Pride and self-will have 
shattered the Kingdom of God till it is this piti- 
ful ruin we see to-day. Now and again the 
clouds part and the life of a saint shines in the 
firmament of the Church as. a star flashes through 
broken storm-clouds. And we reconcile our- 
selves to the horror of a wrecked Kingdom and 
even tell ourselves that it does not matter very 
much — that the work of God is going on all the 
time. We decline to recognise our own sins and 
repent; rather, we try to justify our sins as vir- 
tues! At moments we rouse ourselves and 
realise that the world is not being converted, and 
we question anxiously what is the trouble; but 
how can the world be converted by those who 
love it as it is? How can those who are steeped 
to the lips in the joys the world offers, effec- 
tively warn it to flee from the wrath to come? 
We talk of the coming of the Lord as a regen- 
erating power in human society; but we make 
regeneration impossible by our self -identification 
with society as it is. The Day of the Lord to us 
cannot be light but only darkness, until we have 
heeded the voice of the Lord which bids us come 
out of the world and set ourselves against it; 



284 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

until we take to heart the words of S. John: 
" All that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, 
the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not 
of the Father." The Lord will come when we 
want him, when a converted and united Church 
has found the meaning of his teaching; only such 
a Church, united in the love of the Father and 
of the Son through the power of the Holy Spirit, 
will be ready for the unveiling of the heavens 
and the Coming of the Judge. 

Consider, second, 

Whether you are so absorbed in the world and 
what it is giving you that you are only an in- 
effective disciple of the risen Jesus, only an im- 
perfect manifestation of his will? To S. John 
the heavens opened and he saw visions of God. 
In one way that was a special grace given him; 
in another, it is true to say that he sees who can 
see. It is true that we receive from God every 
man according to his several ability. It is true 
that he who has ears to hear, hears; and he who 
has eyes to see, sees. Are you conscious of any 
vision, of any voice that comes from God? If 
you are not, is: it not most likely that it is because 
your senses are drugged with the sin of worldli- 
ness ? Is it true that you do not look to the fu- 
ture with any joy; that the passing years which 



OUR INVITATION TO JESUS 285 

carry you visibly nearer to the end, visibly whiter 
and weaker, bring with them anxiety and dread ? 
Does the sound of the Passing Bell rouse in you 
thoughts that you strive to put away ? They will 
not be put away; you will have to face them. 
For the physical universe the years may run to 
centuries and the centuries to milleniums, but not 
so for you. " The days of our age are three- 
score years and ten ; and though men be so strong 
that they come to four-score years; yet is their 
strength but labor and sorrow; so soon passeth 
it away, and we are gone." What, then, are 
we going to do? Are we to continue clinging 
to a passing world? Or are we going to make 
our pious phrases realities, and center our lives 
where Jesus sitteth on the Right Hand of God? 
Are we going to realise that the consistent, ever- 
present antagonist of the Christian life is the 
WORLD? So long as we are hungry for that, 
valuing its gifts above all things, unable to dis- 
pense with its pleasures, avid of its joys and 
clinging to its riches, the love of the Father is 
not in us, and the thought of the coming of Christ 
is not a joy? Consider, that Jesus is your Re- 
deemer, the Lover of your soul who offers him- 
self to you. Consider the wonder of that offered 
love! Why to you? What have you done? 
You have only been unfaithful and come short 



286 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

of the vocation of God for you. You have paid 
scant attention to the salvation that is in Christ 
Jesus. You have loved the world and the things 
that are in the world. But Jesus continues to 
offer himself for you and to you. Are you going 
to get down on your knees now and cry to him ? 
Tell him that you have come back. Tell him 
that you, unworthy of any love, will try to love. 
Ask him to wait for you while you repent ; to de- 
lay so long his coming ; and then, having absolved 
you, to come. Pray, " even so come, Lord 
Jesus." 

Let us pray, 

For detachment, for longing, for eagerness. 
Pray to want to see Jesus. 

Grant, O Lord, that as we are baptised into 
the death of thy blessed Son, our Saviour Jesus 
Christ, so by continual mortifying our corrupt 
affections we may be buried with him; and that 
through the grave, and gate of death, we may 
pass to our joyful resurrection; for his merits, 
who died, and was buried, and rose again for 
us, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. 

We have through these meditations been listen- 
ing to the voice of our Lord calling us. He has 
called us in many ways and on many grounds. 
As we examine the phenomena of the spiritual 



OUR INVITATION TO JESUS 287 

life and notice the manifold ways by which the 
divine voice reaches us we are impressed with 
what we might perhaps venture to call the in- 
genuity of God. And as one looks back over 
one's life one is ashamed of the trouble that one 
has put God to in the matter of one's spiritual 
growth. We have had so little spontaneity, so 
little ambition. 

If these meditations have been of any avail 
they will have done something to arouse de- 
sire for our Lord, a looking forward with joy 
to his coming. Intense desire for the final meet- 
ing is perhaps too much to expect of average 
humanity. We find ourselves inhibited by the 
thought of what we must go through to attain 
to our Lord. The will to live is a natural and 
a right instinct; we have presently a work to do 
here, a work that God has given. A life of the 
service of God would be impossible now unless 
we took a healthy interest in this life and its af- 
fairs. 

But that does not mean that we are to im- 
merse ourselves in the world to the extent that 
we dread any thought of separation from it. 
Our vocation calls us heavenward, and if we have 
been true to it we must have developed some in- 
terest in the future. If there is real desire for 
our Lord that will show itself in various ways. 



288 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

It will show itself in detachment. Detach- 
ment is a certain indifference toward material 
things and pleasures and gratifications. Its in- 
dex is that we should be always ready to give them 
up. We may not be called to give them up; 
we may have a very real joy in them as the gift of 
God to us; but we hold them subject to the will 
of the Giver, and never balance them against 
spiritual acquisition or the call to serve. S. Paul's 
attitude is the ideal : " What things were gain 
to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea, 
doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the 
excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my 
Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all 
things, and do count them but refuse, that I may 
win Christ." 

There will be a growing emphasis on the spir- 
itual aspects of life. It is interesting to look 
back and see how the spiritual has come to have 
meaning for us. Once it was rather a dim word, 
and then with growing experience we began to 
assign it content, and it became richer and richer. 
Run over in your own mind what you now mean 
by spiritual. See how you have lived into a spir- 
itual experience until " spiritual " now means the 
intercourse of your spirit with Christ. A real 
friendship has grown up between you and our 



OUR INVITATION TO JESUS 289 

Lord, which is marked by acts on either side — 
prayers and graces. 

As the meaning of Spiritual grows more rich 
it acts as a test of values. We are able to un- 
tangle the web of complex motives and get rid 
of the worldly and hold to those which have 
issue in the permanent qualities of character. 
Out of all that life offers we are learning to make 
selection of those things which we can take with 
us as a permanent treasure. " We take nothing 
out of this world " is true only of material things. 
We do take all the spiritual riches we can acquire. 
The works of the flesh end here; the fruits of the 
Spirit are reaped and stored for eternity. 

Advancement in spiritual attainment is marked 
by growth in the enjoyment of religion. One 
pities those to whom religion stands for a round 
of duty that has to be performed under penalty. 
Such a religion is really a manifestation of fear. 
True religion is an expression of joy. And it 
is a joy that is possible under conditions of dif- 
ficulty and hardness. One who has a great work 
to accomplish is obliged to throw into the doing 
of it all the energy of his life, and comes from 
it utterly exhausted; but the doing of it was at- 
tended with great and growing joy; so the Chris- 
tian finds life an unending battle, and the victory 



290 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

that he wins only the prelude to a greater strug- 
gle; but in the struggle itself he finds that joy- 
is his. I do not know why we should assume 
that joy is a phenomenon of sloth; in reality it is 
an attendant on victory. 

As we push upward, our vision clears. While 
we are in the valley the clouds obscure the view 
of the peak of the mountain. But struggle up 
through the mists and you come out above the 
clouds. There is always the cloud belt about 
the spiritual life. It is an illusion of the foot- 
hills that the path will be easy, that we have 
already triumphed before we have well begun. 
The easy slope encourages the beginner ; but pres- 
ently the rough climbing begins. But we do not 
go on blindly; there was some vision before we 
started or we should not have wanted to begin. 
God is always showing himself to us, and shows 
himself just as fully as we are able to see. The 
limitation is all on our side. We might see 
so much more than we do! I remember a man 
who built his house in a valley shut in on all 
sides ; he said he did not want a distant view. I 
think there are a good many Christians like that 
— they are content to sing, " one step enough 
for me." But at least one would be expected to 
desire some vision of the end, for what one is 
seeking is Christ. Unless we can in some degree 



OUR INVITATION TO JESUS 29 1 

see him now we lack the impulse to go on. Lack 
of vision — extended vision — is one of the things 
which prompt sloth. 

Thus we look from the outset for a certain 
coming of our Lord to our souls. Our prayers 
are not just hands groping in the dark, but hands 
stretched out to find our Lord. We should not 
stretch them out at all unless we found. The 
very desire to find him more is an indication 
that we have found him already. Or rather, 
it is an indication that he has found us. "If 
I had not found thee, thou wouldst not have found 
me. 

It is not so much the presence of our Lord that 
is being gradually revealed to us, as it is the 
meaning of our Lord. A rapid turning of the 
leaves of a book gives us a rough notion of its 
contents, while it takes long hours to master it; 
so to find the meaning of our Lord is the inex- 
haustible work of love throughout eternity. The 
more we desire, the more he gives himself. 

The desire that he arouses is the desire to know 
now. We sometimes hear people talk as though 
they were looking forward to the end of the life 
as the time when they would come to know our 
Lord. But here is the time and place to know. 
Our Lord's promise was that he would not leave 
us orphans but that he would come to us; and 



292 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

surely we are finding him in our lives. How could 
we go on praying and making our communions 
if we did not find him in them? All life would 
go out of our spiritual acts unless he were there. 
I cannot fancy keeping on in the practice of 
religion except as that practice held a conscious- 
ness of our Lord. 

It is not through hope of the future but 
through present experience that we come to be 
certain of his love, his care for us. We grow 
in the certainty of his love as a personal thing. 
Inconceivable as it is that he should care for me, 
yet am I absolutely certain that he does. Why 
he does I do not know; that he does I do know. 
It has been the history of my life that he does. 

Therefore we look on, on the basis of this ex- 
perience to a further knowledge of him. There- 
fore we are eager for a further revelation. 
Therefore we long for the fuller unfolding. 
Therefore as our path extends nearer and nearer 
to the end of the temporal, we gladly think of the 
completion of our warfare and the ending of the 
course, when death shall be swallowed up in 
victory. 

We do not shrink from the meeting of what lies 
beyond death. We do not know, pessimists say, 
what lies on the other side of death. But we 
Christians, at least, do know. We know that 



OUR INVITATION TO JESUS 293 

the coming death is the coming of our Blessed 
Lord. We do not care to know very much of 
the detail beyond that. The other things do not 
so much matter. That we shall find our friends 
in Christ; that we shall find the blessed saints of 
God; that will be wonderful, and we dwell on 
the splendor of the experiences that await us. 
But what fills us with joy is the thought of our 
Lord himself, that at last we shall find life's 
meaning when we see it in him. We shall see 
Jesus, and the rest does not matter. 

So we wait, not patiently and submissively 
but eagerly, as those who look for the coming of 
a great love. All that we have lived for is soon 
to be accomplished, as the gates swing open and 
the Lord comes. 

Even so come, Lord Jesus. 

O Dew abundant from the depths divine, 

O sweet white Flower, pure as the mountain snow, 

O precious Fruit, of that celestial Flower, 

O Ransome from the everlasting woe — 

Thou holy Sacrifice for sins of men, 

The Gift that the eternal Father gave — 

Dew of Life, in thee I live again, 

By thee who earnest down to seek and save. 

1 see thee small in low and humble guise, 
And me thou seest, great in shame and sin — 
Lord, I would be thy daily sacrifice, 



294 THE INVITATIONS OF OUR LORD 

Though I am worthless, vile, and foul within. 
Yet into that mean cup thy grace will pour 
The Love that overflows for evermore. 1 

1 S. Mechthild of Magdeburg. 



THE END 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Nov. 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATIO 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 



